Remember Me

I am enjoying the TV series The first episode was really scary and the second developed the story I hope the last episode does not disappoint. Watch it on i player if you can- don't watch it alone!!!!

I loved the characters of Shirley and Tom and Hannah and Roshana you can imagine them as real people and are interested in what happens to them.

The photography is amazing and and essential to the overall creepiness. I will never look at the sea in Scarborough in the same way.

Well done to the casting crew Michael Palin is perfect and the actress who plays Hannah - Jodie Comer is an talented young lady.

Nice to see something with a different story & plot.

I really enjoyed it.

The photography creates the atmosphere setting for the story brilliantly. Great to see Sir Michael do a serious role which he does so well. Complimented by Jody Comer here in this TV programme in the early stages of her climb to fame.

Hannah Ward (Jodie Comer) works at a nursing home. She lives with her younger brother Sean and drunken mother Jan (Julia Sawalha). A social worker falls to her death along with the window and Hannah finds elderly patient Tom Parfitt (Michael Palin) cowering on the floor. He is sent away to a hospital and he leaves her his suitcase. Police detective Rob Fairholme (Mark Addy) investigates the likely accident unless the frail old man somehow pushed the dead lady. Hannah is disturbed by strange occurrences and tracks down Tom who has gone missing. She is confronted by a ghost from Tom's past.

This is a BBC TV production. It's three hour-long episodes. It's a slow moody ghost story. It has a nice moodiness. It's a little too slow. There's no need for its three hour length. A conventional hour and a half movie would work fine. It's a ghost story but it's neither scary nor tense. It's a little spooky but that's all. Certainly, I watched this for Palin. He has a minor haunted role. It's limited but it's still nice to see him anyways. A shorter theatrical movie with a better payoff would make this better. I can imagine a J-horror with more effective scares.

One of the major qualities of a good ghost story lies in the ways directors manage to make the familiar seem unfamiliar. They draw viewers into the story and then deliberately frustrate their expectations, and hence encourage us to wonder about what will happen next.

This is certainly true of Ashley Pearce's production, which casts Michael Palin in the central role as pensioner Tom Parfitt. British television viewers are accustomed to seeing Palin as the genial host of a slew of travel programs; apart from his Monty Python involvement, his roles have been largely confined to comedies such as THE MISSIONARY (1982). In REMEMBER ME he has a very different role as someone dying to leave his house and move to a retirement home; but we are not exactly sure why, especially when he seems uncomfortable in his new surroundings of an antiseptic room with large windows. He strikes up a relationship with Hannah Ward (Jodie Comer), but we sense that there is more to Parfitt's character than meets the eye. He seems emotionally affected, but director Pearce refuses to provide the necessary clues to help us resolve our confusion. Suffice to say that the story revolves around the seaside resort of Scarborough, immortalized in the folk- song "Scarborough Fair."

Stylistically speaking, REMEMBER ME creates a mundane world of an (unspecified) city in the north of England, full of gray terraced houses, damp streets and drab colors. People go about their daily lives, with their ordinary hopes and dreams: Hannah's family hope that their daughter will find a more rewarding career than just being a care home assistant. The community is a multiracial one, trying their best to look after one another, yet ultimately perplexed as to the reasons for Parfitt's apparently eccentric behavior. Like the viewers, Roshana Salim (Mina Anwar) and her family regard him as an enigma.

The pacing of the three-part drama is kept deliberately slow, alternating memorable visual imagery (for example, water gushing down the stairs of Parfitt's home) with clever use of sonic leitmotifs (the repeated singing of "Scarborough Fair.") Viewers are not only introduced into an abnormal world, but they are kept guessing right until the final episode as to what the action "means." Like most ghost stories, the plot involves a close interaction between past and present; neither of them can be kept separate.

REMEMBER ME requires a certain degree of patience, but the resolution is definitely worth waiting for.