Michael Palin takes the lead role in BBC One’s new mystery drama, Remember Me.
Written by Gwyneth Hughes (The Girl, Five Days), the three-part series stars Palin as Tom Parfitt, a frail, old Yorkshireman seemingly alone in the world, whose admittance to a nursing home triggers a series of inexplicable events.
> Order Remember Me on DVD on Amazon.
Episode 1
Sunday 23 November 2014, 9pm
At the age of ‘eighty-odd’, Tom Parfitt (Michael Palin) sits alone in his terraced house in the otherwise entirely Asian community of a small Yorkshire town, and remembers a strange drowned figure washed up on a beach.
Tom carefully fakes a fall to trick social worker Alison Denning (Rebekah Staton) into taking him into residential care. Roshana Salim (Mina Anwar), his friend and neighbour, is upset to see Tom leave, especially when he insists she must never visit.
At the old people’s home, Tom meets 18 year-old care assistant Hannah Ward (Jodie Comer) and they like each other immediately. Hannah is puzzled to discover he’s brought nothing with him but an empty suitcase.
Social worker Alison visits Tom alone in his room to present a framed photograph of himself as a little boy, which she has brought from his old house to help him feel at home.
Mysterious noises bring Hannah running to find that Alison has fallen from Tom’s third floor window. In what looks like a shocking accident, the entire window frame has broken free from the wall. Hannah finds Tom cowering in the corner of the room, claiming: “There’s something missing, and I can’t find it.”
Episode 2
Sunday 30 November 2014, 9pm
Care assistant Hannah Ward (Jodie Comer) goes to visit the strange old man Tom Parfitt (Michael Palin) in hospital, and is shocked to learn that he has escaped.
Det Sgt Rob Fairholme (Mark Addy) is now conducting a Missing Person enquiry to find Tom. Hannah pleads with him to search in Scarborough. She is haunted by the old folk songs she found in Tom’s house and by eerie recurring dreams of the sea, but Rob is unconvinced by Hannah’s hunch.
At the post mortem examination on social worker Alison Denning, the pathologist cannot confirm whether she died of a heart attack or from the fall but he reports water in her lungs.
Rob meets Tom’s neighbour Roshana Salim (Mina Anwar) who lets him into Tom’s house. There he finds the Scarborough Fair collection and the ripped photograph of Tom as a little boy that Hannah returned. Rob also finds documents which reveal that Tom once had a wife, Dorothea, who was tragically killed in an accident on the day of their return from a honeymoon in Scarborough.
At the old people’s home, Hannah’s colleague Shirley is a nervous wreck. She tells Hannah she witnessed someone else at the window when Alison fell, a mysterious Asian figure. Hannah takes Rob to see Shirley, but he struggles to believe her when she tells him the woman she saw was a ghost.
Roshana discovers her son has the other half of the ripped photograph which shows little boy Tom was holding the hand of an Indian woman. Roshana feels instinctively afraid of the photo and gives it to Rob, who reunites it with the half depicting little Tom.
Hannah takes Sean to Scarborough in search of Tom. As they buy ice cream from a café beside the Sun Court at Scarborough Spa, she recognises the distinctive black and white chequered floor from her dreams. While Hannah discovers that missing Tom is not alone, back home Rob discovers that there has been a second mysterious death…
Episode 3
Sunday 7 December 2014, 9pm
The enigmatic Tom Parfitt (Michael Palin) has disappeared, along with his ghostly Indian companion, Isha (Mayuri Boonham). A traumatised Hannah Ward (Jodie Comer) calls detective Rob Fairholme (Mark Addy) for help.
Rob meets Hannah and her brother Sean (Jamie Rooney-West) in Scarborough and tells them Tom has been sighted at a nearby caravan park and they find him battered and bruised, his caravan destroyed and drenched in water.
Tom refuses to be drawn on the significance of Scarborough Fair, but admits that the singer of the song, Richard Hutton, was his wife Dorothea’s grandfather.
Hannah persuades Rob to visit the Hutton family village of Goathland, where they encounter Dorothea’s sister, Loveday Hutton (Sheila Hancock). She tells them that her grandfather’s version of the song, if sung right to the end, has the power to lay a ghost to rest.
Hannah is determined to use the Scarborough Fair song to free Tom, but at what cost to her and Sean?
> Order Remember Me on DVD on Amazon.
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