The Dark (ITV1)
Rating: Four out of five stars
When was the last time you saw a stuffed bear in a pub? Not so long ago, hundreds of country inns had one, usually by the door, paws raised, like a bouncer ready for some argy-bargy.
Where they all came from was a mystery, since bears have been extinct in Britain since Roman times. And where they went is a puzzle, too.
You can hardly leave a seven-foot furball out for the binmen. Perhaps they were eaten whole by moths.
The decor at The Thistle Moor, a bleak Scottish hostelry in The Dark, is heavily reliant on taxidermy: stags’ heads on the walls, weasels fighting under glass domes, that kind of thing.
But it’s the bear by the entrance that lets us know this is not a pub for soft southerners. The white wine is several degrees warmer than the welcome.
Nothing about The Dark will leave you anxious to book a weekend break in the Highlands.
Unlike BBC1’s Shetland, whose spectacular photography has boosted the islands’ visitor numbers by 50 per cent, this six-part thriller makes its remote rural setting look as brutally cold and damp as it is murderous.
But for fans of nasty noir, it’s as fierce and satisfying as neat malt whisky.
From L-R Catherine McCormack as Gloria Maclennan, Laura Donnelly as DI Monica Kennedy, Mark Rowley as DC. Connor Crawford
The Dark, is a British ITV six-part crime drama television series, adapted from the novel From the Shadows by GR Halliday, about a serial killer who is stalking the Scottish wilderness. Pictured is Ack Hesketh as Owen Maclennan
Mark Rowley as DC. Connor Crawford
Based on a novel by G.R. Halliday, The Dark introduces his taciturn heroine DI Monica Kennedy (Laura Donnelly), a single mother who seems to have upset just about everyone she’s ever met — including bereaved couple Barclay and Bethany, played by Emun Elliott and Helen Baxendale.
At the cinema, DI Kennedy’s small daughter Lucy asks whether the film features monsters. ‘Monsters are scared of me,’ she retorts and, to prove the point, she sends one packing a couple of minutes later with a bone-chilling threat.
‘I will take you and I’ll bury you somewhere you’ll never be found,’ she warns a wild-eyed woman who makes the mistake of approaching her family. Nothing about her manner suggests this is empty bluster.
No self-respecting serial killer in a Scottish noir will be content with merely murdering the locals.
Their bodies have to be displayed naked, in poses that hint at occult rituals. So far, we’ve had just the one corpse, a teenage male drugged, strangled and laid face down on a ridge with his hands stretched out as if in prayer.
But it’s not looking good for barworker Rob (Aaron McVeigh), who bicycles home from a pub shift to find a cup of tea waiting for him in his bedroom — which he takes to be an uncharacteristic act of kindness by his dad (Cal MacAninch, a reliably unsettling presence in any crime drama).
Rob knocks back the cuppa. Five minutes later, he’s paralysed and staring in frozen terror as a masked maniac forces his way in through the window — a scene so scary, it tipped right over into horror movie territory.
Unless, of course, it turns out the bear dunnit.
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