Midwinter of the Spirit

Excellent mini-series. This is how I want to watch TV (I'm 8 years late with the review but it's currently on ITVX). Succinct, compact, no wasted or drawn-out scenes. Three eposodes is perfect. Get it over with in a night.

Okay, so it's a little predictable villain-wise, but it weaves mysticism, religion, history, probably a fair bit of mumbo-jumbo, family problems, and is creepy enough to make you check that your doors are all locked before you turn in at night.

It's also a detective story as much as anything; think the da Vinci Code in Hereford. Sort of.

Get a bottle of wine out and knock yourself out.

Having read all the books and loving them, I saw this when it was first on TV, and was so disappointed, mainly due to dreadful casting and the reinvention of one of the characters.

I recently bought the DVD to give it another try, and it hasn't improved any.

Most of it is due to the main actress who is nothing like the Merrily I had imagined. At no stage had I imagined that she was a weak, neurotic woman, but that's how she's portrayed here, and that completely spoils it for me.

A series of TV specials of the Merrily books would have been great had they had sympathetic casting and direction, but after this mess, I doubt we'll ever get to see another.

And don't get me started on what they did with Lol.

Good supernatural drama (best seen before you read the book, or watched objectively). My only issue? Thank heavens for subtitles! I only have partial hearing and found some of the softer spoken actors impossible to hear without them. David Threlfall as Huw Owen absolutely owned the role he played. I sincerely hope there will be future adaptations of Phil Rickman's books, but with more episodes, as three hours wasn't long enough to do them full justice. 6 or 8 episodes would have been better. I look forward to watching without advert breaks. The locations used for filming were beautiful and atmospheric and the characters mostly well cast.

This was frustrating. I've read a few of Phil Rickman's books, including a couple of the Merrily Watkins stories so I was predisposed to like this ITV version.

There were lots of good things (creepy atmos,scary looking spirit, David Threlfall) but for me these were all outweighed by just how pathetic the lead character was. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for having a flawed lead character but there's a fine line between 'flawed' and 'utterly useless' and Anna Maxwell Martin's inappropriately named Merrily lands the wrong side of that line. Rubbish as a mother, evidently a poor wife, an unconvincing clergy, pill-popping, fag-smoking, heavy drinking car crash of a character, she blunders through each episode making a mess of every situation she finds herself in.

I'm not suggesting she should be an ecclesiastical Jack Reacher but I just can't stay interested in a character with so few redeeming features. Shame.