‘This is a good idea with bad possibilities,’ one of the principal characters in BBC Three’s new pre-apocalyptic drama The Fades announces at the beginning of this opening episode, and it’s a fair summing up. There is plenty to enjoy in the sixty minutes that follows, but there’s also some things which fail to convince.
Iain De Caestecker plays Paul, a seventeen year old schoolboy who suffers from bedwetting, dreams of Armageddon and an inconceivably annoying best friend, Mac (Daniel Kaluuya). While Mac constantly witters on – literally without stopping – about himself, crisps, films and sex (‘Sadly, that was genuinely the most sexual experience of my entire life,’ he sighs after the two chums inadvertently get stuck in the girls’ toilets and endure/enjoy the sound of the adjacent cubicle being used) Paul has a more pressing concern: he can see dead people. Not your common-or-garden ghosts, mind you, but the titular Fades – people who have died but not moved on to a better place.
There’s no pattern to who stays and who ascends (‘Life has famine, illness, shittiness… death is similarly crap,’ Neil, another seer, explains) but all the Fades are angry about the ill-fortune Lady Luck has vomited onto them. Worse, one of them – a particularly nasty, Buffy-ish, 28 Days Later-esque superfast zombie-vampire-thing with a penchant for licking eyeballs with his poisonous tongue – has become solid and started killing people.
Neil (Johnny Harris), Sarah (Natalie Dormer) and her foul-mouthed ecclesiastical girlfriend Helen (Daniela Nardini) all know about the Fades and are concerned that more of them will gain a physical form, leading ultimately to the end of the world. ‘The future… it’s ash,’ Sarah moans after a vicious attack by the eye-licker leads to an apocalyptic vision. ‘Everybody’s dead …’
These cindery nightmares are, of course, precisely the same as the ones which have led to Paul’s micturient nocturnal emissions, and soon Neil has sought him out and bestowed upon him the unofficial title of ‘the boy who saw things he shouldn’t be able to’. It’s not quite as snappy as Harry Potter’s soubriquet, but that doesn’t matter.
The concept of The Fades is great. There’s a huge swathe of original ideas from writer Jack Thorne about death and the end of the world (the ash-and-blood dreams and the ‘collateral damage’ of the dead birds that keep dropping out of the sky are particularly memorable touches) and plenty of heart-stopping ‘Zoikes!’ moments from the opening scene onwards.
However, where it stumbles isn’t in the supernatural world, but in the sub-Skins school scenes. There’s plenty of smoking and swearing, reliable teenage telly tropes since the first time Hollyoaks was ever shown after watershed, but the dialogue swings from the exceptional to the appalling and back again like a metronome on m-cat and some of the supporting characters are currently thinner than a GCSE Dance coursework folder.
Paul is a bit too typically sensitive and different to be completely convincing, but he does get to drop a few zingers along the way (‘Well, there’s the female mystique fucked, then,’ he memorably remarks after the incident in the girls’ loos) and Mac’s movie monologues work more often than not. (His opinion of The Sixth Sense is spot-on, both funny and pertinent, but he knows more about Indiana Jones than any seventeen year old in 1981, let alone 2011.)
Similarly, Sophie Wu’s Jay gets more good lines than bad – ‘You’re bum-sucking the shit out of that,’ she observes after seeing Paul’s attempts to smoke a Marlboro Light – and the scene featuring just the two of them together under a gloomy sky and pylons, in spite of some pretty tired stuff about being different, contains an undercurrent of authentically adolescent awkwardness.
Paul’s sister Anna (Lily Loveless), on the other hand, is a dismal caricature with dialogue as poor as her attitude. ‘It’s called being a teenage boy,’ she says of her brother’s peculiar behaviour in a conversation with her equally insipid mother. ‘He should be wanking, not pissing.’ No need.
Happily, if you discount the winsome scene where Sarah’s estranged husband Mark (Tom Ellis) picks up a one-night-stand who changes her mind when she discovers that his not-quite-ex-wife still lives with him – ‘Just a few too many technicalities for a quick shag on a night out’ – and the oh-so-daring concept of a lesbian vicar who swears, the adult characters are all well-rounded, interesting and with more than enough potential to indicate this is a show that won’t, er, fade after a mostly promising opening.
Airs at 9pm on Wednesday 21st September 2011 on BBC Three.