Chimpomatic

Demons

Episode One

ITV1

Another attempt from ITV to come up with something to plug that Saturday night Doctor Who black hole.

Here, it's a fairly generic Buffy ripoff, with large chunks of Neil Gaiman's Neverworld thrown in for good measure. Some boyband wannabe finds out he's the last in the Van Helsing family line when his godfather shows up out of the blue with a large mystic gun and a terrible American accent and points out that there really are things under the bed. They chase them a bit together after going to see a blind piano player in London's Royal Festival Hall and then turning a corner and carrying on their chat in London's Spitalfields market* before Mackenzie Crook (Gareth from The Office) shows up with an odd stuck-on beak on his nose and scares them a bit.

Philip Glenister - so good at getting you to believe in the Life On Mars/Ashes To Ashes time-travel/coma/where-are-we? conceit - is here lumbered with the task of trying to make this work. But as there's absolutely no reason at all why they've made him attempt an American accent, the whole thing struggles from the moment he pops up, simply because you're trying to work out why he's saying things like "let's verily smite these level three entities" all the time, when it would be a lot more convincing (almost) if he'd just been left to say it in his own accent. Maybe they're hoping to sell it to the US? Not much chance really - it's pretty hard to work out why you'd bother taking on monsters from other realms if you're not going to at least try and make it better than Buffy. Might pick up if it can settle down a bit, but at the moment, those London hellmouths don't feel very safe.

*note for non-London chimps: that would take a good 30 minutes to walk in non-TV time