The most recent issue of SFX magazine included reviews of three of the new batch of BBC Drama; Doctor Who and the Christmas Invasion, Life on Mars and the third series of Sea of Souls. Certainly I feel bound to agree. In the recent past, it used to be that for the fan of the sci-fi/fantasy genre there was nothing home grown that was really any good. But now the BBC has three very different series, all successful, and all well written, with decent budgets and good casts. After maintaining that the BBC couldn’t compete with the big budget US shows like the X-Files, and Star Trek in all it’s forms, the BBC has finally tried, and is in many ways producing better shows than the transatlantic competition. Freed from the restrictions of the US system where shows have to churn out more than twenty episodes a year (Doctor Who is currently produced as a series of thirteen episodes, Sea of Souls is only six per series), the producers of the show are able to produce a much better product.

Tonight we watched the fourth in the new series of Sea of Souls. Each show so far has been different. The first had someone apparently possessed by the spirit of a dead criminal, whilst in the second one of the main characters was getting premonitions of the future. Last week we had a sleep experiment that went really awry, with parts of the dreams coming alive, and then this week it was a haunted hotel. This week was really spooky, with guests in two of the rooms hearing animal noises at the same time every night, a hotel porter seeing a door where there should be a wall, and images of a brutal murder appearing on a particular TV screen in one of the rooms. As the story goes on it transpires that the building was once the home of a local newspaper, and shortly before the paper moved on one of the reporters vanished without a trace, leaving his dog locked in the building, and just before he published an expose of a local property developer. It transpires that it is the ghost of the dog, trying to save his master, and endlessly repeating the night he saw his master killed through a closed office door. However once the investigators break the cycle, and it seems everything is over, there is a chilling ending to the story as the ghost of the dog takes it’s revenge on the person who killed his master…

Alongside this we have the fantastic Life on Mars. So far we have had three episodes of this, and whilst it can be watched as a straight police drama, there are definite fantasy moments, for example the way Sam Tyler talks to the test card girl who he finds has left the TV in his room. There are also, when he finds himself drifting in the apparent coma, and hears the echoes of people apparently in the hospital looking after his comatose body, strange sequences from a first person view walking in a wood, with dappled summer sunshine through the trees, fleeting, but hinting at something more. Certainly there do seem to be hints that there may be more than just someone in a coma induced fantasy.

All of these are definitely examples of the BBC on a roll – and long may they continue to produce drama of this standard! Proof, if proof be needed that even years after such classics as Quatermass, the BBC can still produce great sci-fi/fantasy TV.