 Behind the facade of London's shiny dockside developments, its designer boutiques and coffee bars lie forgotten dark corners and darker secrets. It's a city where anything can happen and being young and pretty won't always save you. This cult smash hit follows scary stories and chilling episodes, from vampire documentaries to alien-infested supermarkets, from teenage necromancy to ghostly East End gangsters. In Urban Gothic, you'll find thirteen tales of the city to chill the blood... Allow me to be indulgent for just a moment. Horror anthology show Urban Gothic debuted on Channel 5 on 17 May, 2000. This series of grisly half-hour tales recounted the exploits of zombies, vampires, demons and other assorted terrors to be found stalking the streets of modern-day London. It boasted blood, nudity, swearing, high energy, high concepts and low, low budgets. At the time of its original broadcast, I was 15 years old and it was nigh-on perfect. It's worth keeping in mind, while I wax nostalgic about this show, that this was in the days long before every household had the internet. We didn't have streaming services or digital TV. In our house, we didn't even have Sky. Our television had just five terrestrial channels, one of which was still brand new (Channel 5) and generally ignored. DVDs wouldn't become commonplace for another couple of years, which meant access to old TV anthologies like Tales from the Crypt or Hammer's House of Horror was pretty much impossible. Until Urban Gothic came along, the closest I'd seen to a proper horror anthology was The X-Files or The Outer Limits. Both had their moments in terms of scares, but neither leaned in to full-bore horror. Urban Gothic, the screenwriting debut of 23-year-old Tom de Ville, did. It didn't shy away from the genre's hard edges, dressing itself up as a satire or sci-fi or watering its stories down to appeal to a young-adult demographic. It was graphic, 18-rated, adult (though not necessarily mature) horror designed to shock, offend, frighten and titillate. For teenage me, it was everything I wanted out of a TV show. In many ways, it still is. I'm not going to pretend it's perfect. Of course it isn't. The execution frequently failed to live up to its ideas. But the concept behind the show, its ethos and attitude, is everything I still want from TV horror and everything I continue to be denied by the glut of horror programming in our current so-called 'golden age'. Perhaps that's why, 20 years on, though it's not talked about too often, there are a few of us who continue to hold Urban Gothic in such high esteem – because, whatever its faults, it felt like someone was making a show just for us, doing their level best to give us exactly what we wanted. If Urban Gothic were still around today, I would be writing for it. Either that, or bombarding Channel 5 with spec scripts. Of course, in reality, the show lasted a mere two series. Tom de Ville has moved on to objectively bigger and better things and, in the years since its broadcast, no-one has seriously called for Urban Gothic's return or even reappraisal as a forgotten, hidden gem. But it would be wrong to think it's been completely forgotten, that it hasn't had an influence or doesn't have a legacy. This year, while the show marks 20 years since its first broadcast, I will be releasing my first collection of short horror stories, John McNee's Doom Cabaret, through Sinister Horror Company. In doing promotional interviews for the book, I've been asked what got me into writing horror stories and why I wanted to bring out a collection. Thinking it over, I realised Urban Gothic was a huge part of it. When I was 21, I got it into my head I was going to make a horror anthology TV show. From reading about Urban Gothic online, I'd known Tom de Ville had been about my age when he'd created and written his, so why not me? I didn't know how to write scripts, but I thought if I came up with a bunch of ideas and wrote them as short stories, I could adapt them at a later date. It was a fantasy. I never seriously imagined myself taking meetings with TV executives. But I drew up a list of ideas for episodes anyway, and I started writing stories. And I haven't stopped. Somewhere between then and now, I started selling stories and, on April 24, I'll be publishing John McNee's Doom Cabaret, (excuse the butt in but, you need to pick up a copy it's amazing - Jim Mcleod) which is as close to producing my own anthology show as I'm likely to get. Without question then, Urban Gothic had a huge influence on me. Having said that, it has been a long time since I watched any of the episodes. But with it's 20th anniversary coming up, I'm in the mood to revisit it, starting this week with the pilot, 'Dead Meat'. In subsequent instalments of this series, I'll be checking out two episodes at a time. If you can track them down, I hope you'll join in and watch them along with me. And check out my interview with Tom de Ville to learn about the origins of the show and find out what he thinks, looking back on it two decades later.  S1.01 DEAD MEAT“We found a dead body and we need some of your blood to trap its undead spirit. I thought it might make an interesting night out.” First impressions of 'Dead Meat'? Cheap. Very, very cheap. That's not the kindest thing to say, but it's true. The cameras feel like they've been nicked from Byker Grove along with some of the sets. I'm not sure if even Family Affairs, Channel 5's own cheap-as-chips soap opera, looked as cheap as this first episode of Urban Gothic. In many ways, though, this works to the show's credit, giving it an unpredictable, edgy feel. It feels like a bootleg product that found its way onto television through illegitimate means, somehow avoiding the attentions of executives, slipping through the cracks of standards and practices to arrive, unpolished and uncensored, in your living room. When, around 10 minutes in, a frog is dropped into a blender, you expect the camera to cut away. When it doesn't, instead holding on a lingering, very convincing shot of the poor amphibian being blended to red pulp, the effect is decidedly jarring. This doesn't feel like the kind of show that could have convincingly simulated the blending of a frog. It doesn't seem like it would have the budget to splash on a throwaway gag. But it does feel like the kind of show where someone might just have said “fuck it” and dropped an actual frog into a blender. I'm sure the cast and crew would not have stood for that, but in the moment, it's shocking enough to make you sit up and take a bit more notice of what your watching. What kind of show is this? This is the question it feels like most people would have been asking watching this first episode. It is not an episode which shows Urban Gothic at its best, nor does it show it at its worst. But as an opener, it was probably well chosen. “If you can get on board with this,” it seems to say, “You're going to enjoy yourself.” As for plot, we open with two youths ripping off a gangster and hiding out in an abandoned warehouse. When they stumble on a corpse, they invite their occult-obsessed friend Milton over to try to raise the dead. Why? For fun, of course. The only motivation a teen ever needs. Things go less than well, culminating in a minor bloodbath and transformation for most of the cast into flesh-hungry acolytes of an undead necromancer. It sounds like a simple story, with a handful of characters wandering around the one location, but 'Dead Meat' packs a lot into its 30 minutes, with designer drugs, unresolved romantic entanglements, black magick, decapitation, an underground temple and a subplot involving a randy librarian all thrown into the mix. It all ends up feeling a bit overstuffed, not least because of the dialogue. It isn't that it's bad, there's just so much of it, including more than a few lines that are inaudible or incomprehensible. It's hard to shake the feeling that if the characters had less to say, there might be room for director Andrew Morgan to get creative with building tension or crafting moments of genuine emotion. As it is, there's simply no time for that, because everyone has a lot of lines to get through before the credits roll. At least everything zips along quickly and the cast generally does a good job with the material. The part of protagonist Leo marks an early role for Ashley Walters (aka Asher D), who would go on to stardom in 2004's Bullet Boy and Bulletproof, currently airing on Sky One, with a slew of film and TV credits in between. He makes an engaging enough lead here, even if he struggles to land some of the jokier lines in the quip-happy script. Faring a little better are William Mannering (channelling a young Paul McGann) as wannabe necromancer Milton and Jemima Rooper (then on the cusp of finding TV semi-stardom as Nicki in teen drama As If, a sort of half-forgotten precursor to Skins which was actually much better). Playing a knife-wielding, drug-dealing thug, Rooper is about as convincing a troubled inner-city teen as Sophie Aldred's Ace in Doctor Who, but she nails the tone, seeming to understand the '80s schlock-horror vibe the episode is aiming for better than anyone else. It also has to be said that Kevin Molloy makes a striking impression as cadaver/zombie/necromancer Straker, with his final shot hinting at an intriguing parallel universe in which the 'Dead Meat' story continued as an ongoing series, following the lives of this gang of undead misfits as they eat their way through London's underworld. That wasn't to be. But we will get to see at least one of these characters again... Join me next time for two of the best episodes of the series with 'Vampirology' and 'Old Nick'.   Comments are closed.
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