Urban Gothic (TV series)

Urban Gothic is an interesting and original horror short story anthology format, uniting standard horror material with contemporary urban London settings. Writer Tom De Ville has a good ear for streetwise chatter and a reasonably acute sense of class and ethnic difference; his pieces that are essentially character-driven tend to be more successful than those that depend rather more on sensation and plot device. The London locations and young cast combine to make something surprisingly creepy.
Highlights include the opening episode, "Deadmeat", in which a group of sensation-seeking young people, on the run from drug dealers and sexually rapacious employers, find a corpse with a look of horror on its face and decide to experiment with necromancy. In the fly-on-the wall documentary parody "Vampirology" a film crew follows a vampire on his nightly round of drinks with yuppie friends, before devouring a lost tourist. Keith-Lee Castle's portrait of a lost soul is remarkable, and the guest appearance of Ingrid Pitt, every vampire's favourite starlet, is hilarious. - Roz Kaveney