So, last week I treated myself to the DVD of Dead Set. A recent Channel 4 miniseries based on the brilliant central premise: what if there was a zombie apocalypse while Big Brother was airing, leaving the Big Brother house as the last refuge for the survivors?
Cue a cast of reality TV archetypes struggling to survive - there's the pretentious aging liberal, the nu-lad, reveling in his swaggering stupidity, the bitchy cross dresser, the bolshy ladette, the brainless redhead, the savvy everyman. Tossed into the works is the oafish, bullish producer and the production-company gofer and her well meaning, but intellectually challenged boyfriend.
Now, there's a few things that immediately impressed me about this series - firstly, that they used the actual Big Brother setting, including the presenters, former contestants, music, production style, everything, rather than inventing a "look alike" for the purpose of the show. Considering the level of satire running through the series, that was considerably impressive - kudos has to go for the show's production team for joining in with the joke and letting themselves be satirized so bitingly, and especially Davina McCall, apparently relishing the chance to have her throat ripped out as part of the fun. I suspect that the UK team must have pushed it through the licensing group with the same "it's just a harmless zombie horror" attitude that the writers have publicly taken. But, in reality, there was plenty of black comedy and digs at Big Brother's expense.
Central to the theme was the mirroring of George Romero's zombie movies where consumerism was satirized. Dead Set takes the same attitude to reality television and balances the dark satire without ever going too camp or obvious with it. When one of the characters advances the theory that the walking dead are attracted to the Big Brother house in death as they were in life because it was like a church to them, a place they worshiped, it prompts the solid response "Or maybe they're attracted to bollocks." Or, when receiving the news that the world as they know it has ended, one contestant's immediate reaction "Does this mean we're not on telly any more?"
Otherwise the zombie apocalypse is a mash up of various other zombie movies. The flesh eating monsters are closer to the fast movie plague victims of 28 Days Later (prompting comment from Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg). It's all horrifically gory, too. No holds barred, flesh ripping grotesque.
There's a few problems - to extend the format to one-nightly episodes, the story seems stretched and instead of a movie-length feature, there's an awful lot of padding between the good bits.
This ties into another disappointment, in that the satire of the Big Brother experience is somewhat negated when the central characters leave the house a number of times. It's during the opening chapters, when the creepy claustrophobia is kicking in and towards the end, where the in-fighting and alliances of the house come to a bloody head that, the premise works at its best.
But there's plenty of good - the central heroine is played by Ray Winstone's daughter Jaime, and is as good in the quiet, vulnerable moments as when she's caving in a zombie's skull with a fire extinguisher. The supporting cast acquit themselves admirably, especially Andy Nyman as the horrifically foul mouthed and generally foul producer with a god complex, who chews the scenery and shits it out in a scene stealing role.
And then there's lovely Davina, transformed into a slavering, crazed monster and given not one, but two horrifically gory death sequences which had me repulsed and roaring by equal measure. "This is Davina - I'm coming to get you!" has never been more chilling.
And the satire is, if you'll pardon the pun, biting.
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