Vampire slaying for grown-ups. Ultraviolet.

Vampires triumphantly crossed the Atlantic twice in the late 1990s to colonize television screens on each side of the Pond.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was imported into Britain in 1997 to the obsessive delight of the teenage and young adult viewership. (Not to say to the prurient joy of large numbers of middle-aged men). In return, the UK’s Channel Four sent Ultraviolet westwards to no less critical acclaim and equal commercial success with older audiences in the United States in 1999. Vampires were hot television property and audiences from Hawaii to the White Cliffs of Dover wanted a piece of the action.

Ultraviolet is proudly broadcasting its ninth season this autumn with fresh ideas and the biggest budget yet and the release of the third film will be the cinema event of the festive season. Blade in Britain, the spin-off series starring Idris Elba and his sidekick Eric, played by Wesl…Oh. Wait a minute. Bollocks. That all happened in the same parallel universe where Angel and Firefly and Dead Like Me weren’t cancelled and American Idol and Eastenders never survived their pilot episodes.

Sorry. Back on Earth Prime, Ultraviolet didn’t even do too well in Britain. It was broadcast, if memory serves, on Monday nights at 10 PM. Not exactly a prime viewing time of week and day; even on one of our then-only four nationally available TV channels. It lasted one series. Six episodes. One unaired US spin-off. Then zip. Nada. Tumbleweeds cross the screen. Crickets singing in the otherwise silent night.

Damned pity that.

Ultraviolet was a fab series.

‘Fab’ as in ever-after outdated and awfully self conscious but briefly state-of-the-art or at least 'with it' British science fiction. Call it cutting edge.

The vampire story was brought bang up to date with their conspiracy to achieve secret domination of the human race before it destroys itself, the Earth and the vampires themselves. ‘Our free-range days are over,’ says the Inquisition’s UK commander to his new potential recruit, honest copper Michael Colefield. Aids; BSE; the destruction of rainforests; the First Gulf War; Chernobyl and nuclear winter: all are grist to Joe Aherne’s then-topical mill. These vampires don’t inhabit crypts or castles, though they do secretly build plumbing-free hideaways into modern buildings. They operate hospices which are actually medical laboratories researching into the nature of blood and they conduct hybridizing operations on unsuspecting women. They organise forgery rings and invest heavily in the futures markets and they have facilities in South America for experimentation on humans.

They keep themselves secret because they want to be and because they have suborned a number of human beings. The good guys keep them secret because they are afraid of mass panic and a theocracy established to defend against the vamps. ‘I don’t want to live in Iran.’

The good guys are secret themselves. Loosely supervised by the Vatican and funded by the British government’s embezzlement of health and defence funds, they work from an ultra-modern stock-shot office building in London. They are armed with automatic weapons that fire reinforced graphite rounds and which have UV mirror sights which show human beings but not vampires. Vampires do not show up on TV or video, and are inaudible on telephones as well as the traditional mirrors. The eyes have it. If you can see them, that is. They are faster and stronger than humans. Lead bullets don’t work. The organisation’s rules of conduct are shoot first and you might live to ask questions afterwards. Even when the garlic-gas drops a vampire - ‘Code Five’ from the Latin numeral - to the ground, the masked special forces boys shoot him until he explodes and leaves a heap of smoking ashes to be scraped up and incarcerated in a UV- blasted high-tech crypt. Incarcerated. They can regenerate.

All three of the frontline officers: Mike (Jack Davenport); Angie March (Susannah Harker*); and Vaughan Rice (Idris Elba) - have lost people precious to them to Code Five violence or as a result of their plotting, and the leader, a spiffy-modern Catholic Priest called Pearse Harman (Philip Quast), is not without his vulnerabilities too.

But for all their wealth and hypnotic power and immortal strength, the vampires’ greatest weapon is their skill at manipulating human emotions.

Firstly they use love. The prospect of gaining a lover or the hope of winning a lost one back turns the bravest heart weak and the firmest resolve traitorous. They subvert or intimidate people through family loyalty and pride, through the desire to have children or the fear of losing existing ones, and through offering the chance to avoid senility and, of course, death. Joining the vampires’ ranks can be a refuge from illness or justice or a life of crippling pain and disability. Helping them and staying mortal can satisfy greed or perverted sexual desire or offer hope to a dying relation.

Most awfully of all, they use human beings’ sense of right and wrong. They confuse. They create straw men. They draw false parallels. They claim to be victims and to be morally equivalent to the human defenders. Surely, says one, we do terrible things, but so does God. (They irradiate HIV/AIDS sufferers beyond legal limits looking for a supposed cure.) If we’re so similar that our lovers can’t tell us from humans, are we that different? (This while trying to blackmail a widow into releasing a particularly valuable vampire prisoner.) They don’t have fangs or glaring eyes or claws, and so they seem quite human and reasonable (as they try to blackmail a dying man into betraying humanity.) They look human. They speak softly. They know what people care about and what they fear. Vampires use human goodness as a shield. Consequently, when the former policeman Mike sees his ex-army partner roughing up a paedophile in order to find the identity of a child-molester who might be working for the vampires, he visibly cringes and tries to ignore the interrogation. When the chief scientist takes a scalpel to the uncomplaining captive who is supposedly immune to pain, Mike’s conscience sees a good person turned into a soulless torturer. Organisations like yours never want peace, says the vampire who is exploiting Mike’s longed-for girlfriend; they keep the war going so that they can continue to exist. They speak softly. They hide amongst the virtuous and the sinners and the sordid alike and you can’t tell them easily apart. Poor Mike. He starts to feel uncertain about the organisation’s rightness when he accidentally shoots an innocent man. His horror at the prospect of killing the innocent (or at least the non-vampire enemy conspirator) casts doubts in Mike’s mind over the justice of the whole war.

This was 1998, and yet, and yet…Self-delusion. The honest desire for peace. An unwillingness to cause harm, no matter what the costs of defeat and slavery might bring. Preferring to believe that both sides are equal than to bear the emotional and other costs of taking the side that causes the least harm…

Aherne has written a work here that will last and be meaningful for centuries if it survives censorship or destruction in war, because its moral themes are central to the ideals of our civilization. Who shall guard against the guardians? Which ends justify which means? Can aggressors sometimes be victims too, and even if they are, should we offer up our throats to them rather than use force which, even as an instrument of goodness, is still bloody and hurtful and cruel? Damn me, but these ideas seem kind of topical. Not that Aherne would thank me, I imagine, for pointing it out. I could be wrong.

Which is, in the end, what Mike has to deal with. He might be wrong. The finale is messy and uncertain, and each of the heroes has been way out on a limb and nearly fallen and it is far from certain that any of them can come in again. At last, in a war against those who plan to use natural catastrophes to put themselves into power and to make fresh new disasters to march the whole of humanity into slavery or death, then sides have to be taken. Losses must be mourned but also compared to the world which would otherwise come to be. The Beast must be recognized for what it truly is and judged; not by its golden words or by decent peoples’ fears, but by its iron deeds.

They never made a second series, but I’d like to think that Mike and Co are out there, bloody and unbowed, with enough steel in their wills to see the fight through for the sake of the rest of humanity.

Or should that be ‘Bronze?’
Sigh.

AB

*Oh, yes indeed.

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