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Ultraviolet (1998) INTRODUCTION In the wake of the global success of The X-Files (1994 - present), TV producers the world over were soon engaged in an unseemly scrabble to find the 'new X-Files', the next big genre thing. US screens were soon awash in all manner of dark paranoia shows, some good (Dark Skies, Millennium, American Gothic), some bad (The Pretender, The Visitor), some just plain unspeakable (Prey). In Britain, the response was characteristically slow and half hearted - The Uninvited lived up to its name (nobody asked for it and when it turned up anyway, no-one really bothered with it); Invasion: Earth was a feeble disappointment; Wilderness came and went without making much impression; and Bad Blood was just plain dreadful. Sandwiched among this tatty collection, however, was an unexpected gem - unexpected in that it was not only genuinely very good, but unexpected in that it came from an unusual source. Ultraviolet was the brainchild of writer / director Joe Ahearne, one of the talents behind the immensely popular BBC drama This Life and that it should be he who proved that British TV really could do this 'dark paranoia' stuff so well was both surprising and intriguing. From those who bothered to take note of it at all, Ultraviolet had to suffer the unwelcome and unwarranted (though by now largely predictable) comparisons with Chris Carter's FBI conspiracy hit; when the show was released on video in the UK, a quote for The Daily Mail explicitly hailing the show as "a dark, stylish vampire thriller for the X-Files generation" was used in the advertising campaign. But Ultraviolet is really a very different beast altogether and, in many respects, it surpassed The X-Files. The reasons why Ultraviolet succeeded where so many had failed are many and varied - an unusually strong cast worked well together, emerging as the strongest ensemble team assembled for a British show in many years; Ahearne's direction was unobtrusive and commendably understated; rooting the show in a recognisable milieu (a lot of it seems to be set in or around London) gives it some much needed audience identification. But the real star of the show was clearly the strength of Ahearne's writing. In creating Ultraviolet, Ahearne seems to have hit on three major coups which helped to set it apart from the rest of the pack. First of all, as David Pirie noted in his perceptive piece on the show in Sight and Sound December 1998 (one of the earliest serious analyses of the show and still the best), Ahearne has created a world in which vampires are easily accepted by both characters and viewers. He does so by the simple expedient of presenting us with a slightly skewed version of the real world, one where "nothing much has been written or discussed about vampires since the publication of Dracula in the nineteenth century" (Pirie, 1998, p.29). As a consequence, Ahearne is able to do away with much of the baggage of the contemporary vampire thriller: "There have been no Lee or Lugosi movies, no spin-offs, no lolly wrappers, no fake fangs. The subject of vampires appears to be known, but it is obscure. This subtle cultural alteration is never alluded to directly, but it has a remarkable effect" (ibid.). At first sight, Ultraviolet may seem (as it did, initially, to Pirie) to be just another cops-vs.-vampires show, a formula that had already been done a number of times (Starsky and Hutch; Night of Dark Shadows (1998); The X-Files: 3 (1997)) but it emerged as one which had so much more to offer. Ultraviolet was not as simplistic as some of the advance publicity may have led us to believe and was, far from being simply a post-AIDS take on a well worn theme, a major re-invention of the entire vampire mythos. Ahearne cleverly manages to get through almost six hours of drama without ever mentioning the word 'vampire' and instead set about challenging every preconception his audience may have brought with it. In the world of Ultraviolet, the vampires are a far cry from the seductive sexual predators of popular fiction - instead, they're shadowy figures who, when exposed to the cool glare of nocturnal public gaze, can seem awesome, ridiculous, manipulative and tragic in equal measure. Very human, in fact. As the video blurb had it, "they look like us... They act like us..." What's more, these are very modern vampires - one of Ahearne's more amusing revisions has it that vampires cannot be seen on video (hence the video assist guns the nominal heroes carry) nor heard over the telephone, forcing them to rely on speech synthesisers to communicate at a distance. Such is their comfort with modern technology that the sinister conspiracy they are creating is engaged in all manner of ill-defined but clearly detrimental blood research and towards the end, there are chilling hints of the nuclear obliteration of Mankind at their hands. The beauty of this approach is that Ahearne is able to simply let his characters get on with things and not have them stopping once a week to remind us of how patently absurd it all is - "no vampire jokes, no references to fangs or cloaks or bats or coffins. No scenes in which characters express outraged disbelief" (ibid.). For Ahearne's protagonists, the existence of vampires is simply accepted and attention is subsequently focused not on soul-searching and agonised acceptance of the facts but on deciding how best to deal with the situation. Ahearne's second coup was in his refusal to paint the characters in the broad black and white strokes that one might expect. The few vampires that we see are a mixed bunch - a bent cop gone over to the other side; a sad husband who wants to father an undead child with his grieving wife; a young boy sold to paedophiles as part of a monstrous experiment; and the erstwhile envoy sent to negotiate a sort of settlement with the forces of the living. None of them are as purely, one-dimensionally evil as they might first appear - the father-to-be is simply so desperate for a child that he will go to any lengths, while the vampire rent-boy is a victim twice over. Only the suavely sinister 'John Doe', the mysterious envoy captured by the authorities comes across as evil incarnate. Ranged against the vampire menace are the operatives of a secretive governmental organisation every bit as sinister as the threat it seeks to contain. Perhaps Ahearne's real coup was his quite brilliant casting of the 'forces of good' as bullies, sadists and stone-cold killers. In the astonishing third episode, Sub Judice, the agents of the mysterious and unnamed organisation spend much of their time trying to coerce a woman into terminating the vampire foetus she is carrying; black ex-soldier Vaughan Rice repeatedly speaks of the "leeches" in terms that are uncomfortably racist; and as 'John Doe' is quick to point out "we're more alike than not" though this doesn't stop the organisation from callously gunning down the creatures (officially referred to as "Code Vs") at the drop of a hat. This refusal to play the game as we might expect is one of Ultraviolet's trump cards and it certainly helped Ahearne to create a memorable cadre of characters about whom one actually cares. The uniformly excellent acting helps no end, but it remains Ahearne's carefully constructed characters, acute ear for dialogue and above all his sense of pace that keeps the show's momentum up. The pacing of the show is Ahearne's third major coup. The pace is superbly maintained, not only within each episode but also across the entire series. Unusually for this sort of thing, Ahearne seems to have carefully considered the shape of the series as a whole, giving the six episodes a structure that was lacking in other shows. While The X-Files floundered in the morass of its increasingly confused and threadbare conspiracy arc, Ultraviolet maintained a similar paranoid arc throughout. Admittedly, the mini-series format went a long way to helping, but there's still a sense that Ahearne had the climax of the sixth episode in mind when he wrote the opening scenes of the first show. Ultraviolet begins in the mundane and the commonplace as long-time friends prepare for a wedding. While it maintained that emphasis on the personal and the small-scale, Ahearne was simultaneously able to nudge the show to an apocalyptic climax with Mankind teetering on the brink of annihilation. It was a brilliant move, the work of a talented and gifted writer in full command of his material. The jaw dropping twists and turns of episode six, In Nomine Patris are achieved without losing sight of the intensely personal issues that lay at the heart of every episode. That Ultraviolet has yet to see a second series is nothing short of scandalous and is a sad reflection on the state of British TV in the late 1990s - a fine, intelligent and demanding piece of work like this is left to fade into relative obscurity as the airwaves continue to be clogged by derivative home decoration shows, cookery shows and game shows. A belated UK video release (a full year after it was first shown) and an even more remote but very welcome DVD release (in 2001) at least gave it the wider exposure it deserved. It remains one of the true classics of British television. Bibliography KEVIN LYONS
Last Updated: 1 January, 2009
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INTRODUCTION