P.R.O.B.E: The Devil of Winterborne

 "I'm Gavin Purcell, not Dennis Wheatley!"

The first episode was good, if cheap. The second instalment is, I think, even better... if cheap. It is, as the above quote suggests, a very low budget riff on Dennis Wheatley devil worship cult stuff, is very cleverly written as the revelations unfold and (SPOILERS!) ends up having no apparent supernatural elements in the end.

It's not just the very well done plot, though. Mark Gatiss again gives us some superb dialogue. The ending is horrifying. Caroline John once again excels at a rather nuanced portrayal of the pipe smoking, older Liz Shaw... and is there a mild hint, as the two of them get a bit pissed on wine, that she and Patsy may be old flames? Are we also going to get Terry Molloy's semi-sceptical detective as a new regular?

The other standout performance is, of course, from Peter Davison, whose character we are kept guessing about until close to the end. His "confession" is truly chilling and shows how bloody good Davison can be when given the chance to play a baddie... although in this case, of course, things are not quite what they may seem...

There's some nice indications of evolving social attitudes here, as well as towards mental health with the character of Georgie, although admittedly this is outsider drama from the younger generation. Overall, though, this is a highly impressive second instalment. 

Good Omens: Hard Times

"I didn't really fall. I just, you know, sauntered vaguely downwards..."

A surprising start, this time, as an extraordinarily long pre-credit sequence charts the history of what both Aziraphale and Crowley would no doubt refuse to call a friendship, and has a lot of fun along the way. So Crowley raises an eyebrow at God's genocidal plans as Noah builds his Ark, and it's in fifth century Britain that both of them realise they've been cancelling each other out with their various schemes so they may as well achieve the same thing by doing precisely sod all. It's all a rather funny addition and ends with a highly entertaining Second World War scene containing 66.67%  of the League of Gentlemen, which can never be a bad thing. and the other 33.33% is William Bloody Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, in the present day, the plot doesn't really advance much, but it fails to do so most entertainingly. We, and Adam, learn that Anathema is a new age type. Shadwell hasn't got much of an imagination. Crowley and Aziraphale are a superb double act, and both Sheen and Tennant are amazing. There's a new horseman- Famine.

It's all very silly in a very Douglas Adams kind of way. And there are few more pleasurable ways to spend fifty minutes.

Doctor Who: Sleep No More

"Don't watch it!"

Wow. That was brilliant. Genuinely chilling, possibly the scariest episode of Doctor Who ever, and certainly Mark Gatiss' best ever script.

The "found footage" nature of the episode means that it has to be bloody well shot, and it is. The future world is sketched out just enough- a colony on the Neptunian moon of Trition, Indo-Japanese and, in a nice touch, polytheistic. It's the 38th century and, clearly, the capitalist worship of work for its own sake is as bad as our world, with the invention of "Morpheus" to remove the need for more than a few minutes' sleep. So we can work more, of course. Heaven forfend that there would be any other reason.

The plot is fiendishly clever, at one point turning on the delightfully metatextual point that, in this episode of found footage, there are no cameras to be seen. Even more metatextual is the final, terrifying cliffhanger: everything we've seen has just been a charade. The real infections the footage... which we've just seen. Brilliant.

Also worthy of praise are Capaldi, for his extraordinary and gripping delivery of the exposition, and for the superbly effective appearance of the "Sandmen", which add so much to the episode. The idea of the Sandmen- monsters made from sleep dust which arise if we deprive ourselves of sleep for too long- are a decidedly Moffatian idea from Gatiss' pen.

Also worthy of praise, in a very interesting part, is Gatiss' former League of Gentlemen comrade Reece Shearsmith. It's nice to see some consistency in giving the casts northern accents- Nagata's lines are even scripted to be Geordie! 

So, yeah, right up there with the best. A sublime bit of telly. Interestingly, though, it ends with the threat still out there but, apparently, an unrelated episode next week. So what twist on the two-parter format are we getting here...?