TV: In The Flesh - Series 2

I watched the start of the second series of In The Flesh this week, and surprised myself by really enjoying it.

I’m not a fan of horror.  I feel guilty about dismissing a whole genre, because I like to think of myself as culturally open-minded,  but it doesn’t entertain me and I don’t really know why. 

I don’t like not getting it; it frustrates me that an entire genre can escape me.  A lot of my friends do like their horror (to the extent where some of them are involved in making horror films) so over the years I’ve seen some high-end examples that should have given me an 'in': a few Saw films, The Ring, Shaun Of The Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, Zombieland, Hostel - loads of the stuff really, and most of them in the end pretty much drew a blank, the occasional exception proving the rule.  If anyone wants to try me with more recommendations, recommend away!

It never works its gory charms and for me watching a horror film is a bit like staring at a blood-spattered magic eye poster for a few hours and then walking away baffled.  The only horror films I really enjoyed were Peter Jackson’s early attempts at film-making, Brain Dead and Bad Taste - they are extremely funny, good-natured and more fun than anything else he went on to make.  But that means that I enjoyed them as slapstick comedies rather than horror, so doesn’t really count.

The fact that I liked In The Flesh so much probably doesn’t count either then, because I enjoyed it as character-based drama that satirasies society.  Damn.  In The Flesh, nominally ‘about’ zombies but really uses them in an allegorical way to make a drama about society’s religious, racial and medical outsiders.  It’s set in a Northern community post-apocalypse and focuses mainly on 20ish Kieren, who suffers from Partially Deceased Syndrome (PDS).  He is an outsider who is making efforts at integration.  He takes medication to keep him ‘normal’ and wears contact lenses to hide his tell-tale glaring eyes.  He works in the local pub, but wants to go abroad and see Paris and gives every impression of being a normal 20 year old who just happens to be dead.  He represents the acceptable face of the undead – he wears make up to hide his dead flesh to make the point literal, in case the audience hadn’t picked up on that yet.  The idea of being a zombie is normalised into modern society in the same way that being a werewolf or ghost was in Being Human (albeit for more dramatic and less sitcom purposes).

He is not like the undead we see at the start of the episode, who perpetrate a terrorist attack on a tram by snorting some stuff that made them go batshit crazy and then killing everyone.  Not only do the trams in Nottingham look better than the Salford ones, you can bet NCT wouldn’t let that kind of thing happen on their turf.  These are the undead who give the undead a bad name, members of the Undead Liberation Army.  They have a cult-commune base, and Kieren’s old friend Amy is one of them.

The prejudice shown against the undead is all of the small town variety that UKIP trades on – women gossiping in corners, men sneering and making abusive comments in the pub.  In the midst of all this, a party called Victus has a new MP in town, trading on peoples’ fears of the other for political power (as if that could ever happen).  She is a black woman, in a rather unsubtle effort to show that being in a minority group herself does not mean she is not open to feelings of prejudice. 

It all kicks off in the pub at the end of the episode (it is made by BBC Salford after all), and it looks as if Kieren is going to stop trying to assimilate and join the revolutionaries, who are open about their difference to everyone if a little dogmatic with it…  It should be interesting to see what happens – I’m guessing that Kieren is going to enjoy the freedom in not having to pretend to be the same as everyone else for some time, but at some point is going to renounce their way of existing when they try to involve him in something naughty (possibly against his sister if the programme-makers are being unimaginative).  The UKIP, sorry, Victus MP has some agenda of her own which also drew me in – she’s already murdered a rabid undead, and persists in calling them ‘its’ instead of ‘hes’ or ‘shes’.  Bitch.  This was the start of a second series – I didn’t see (or, in fact, know the existence of) the first series and didn’t feel I was missing anything here, so I don’t know how much of this was a continuation or a new start.  It’s an interesting mashup of lots of different things, from thrillers to Coronation Street (the ladies bitching over a pint could have been cut and pasted from a soap), and although horror tropes are the most obvious ones on show, they’re actually the least integral to the storytelling.  Which is perhaps why I ended up enjoying it so much.