1 out of 5

Written by: Gwyneth Hughes

‘Remember Me’ starts off with enough dour-skied atmosphere and sad-eyed mood to get you through its first third, especially with some inventively creepy framing and the charmingly offbeat man-child performance by Michael Palin.  When Mark Addy and Jodie Comer start getting more screen time, you can already sense the lack of refinement written into their characters, but the actors bring enough humanity to what they’re working with that you want to keep watching to see how things evolve.  Woe is you.  This is another ghost story mini, something the BBC loves, and director Ashley Pearce definitely knows the right moves, but can’t help fill in the blanks of Hughes script, which I suspect was built off of a small kernel of an idea and then slapped into a creepy Mad Libs of sorts as an attempt to flesh it out.  This results: Tom Parfitt (Palin), an elderly man who stages a fall to be placed into a care home, his eccentric behaviors – such as packing an empty suitcase – piquing the interest of careworker Hannah (Comer), who becomes more interested in why Tom left his home after a haunting accident – taking the life of another careworker – occurs in his new room.  Detective Fairholme (Addy) is the detective on the scene, initially open and closing the case before Hannah points him toward some further details…  ‘Remember Me’ proves willing to go odd and violent with these opening strands, and the extras surrounding Fairholme – Skype conversations with a daughter, his avoidance of promotions at work – and Hannah – an emotionally absent mother, a younger brother for whom she obviously plays the parent role – are effective enough at grounding us in the sad reality of the series.  But then we have to start getting into more details.  And it’s apparent that budget and lack of research prevent the detective from ever really seeming like a real detective, or what causes him to handle the case the way he does, and that there’s some family history with Hannah Hughes really, really wants to tell us about and so shits it out to excess in the third act, and then, right, this is a ghost story so here’s some justifications for it being in that genre that really don’t make any sense.  I was okay leaving this at two stars as it plods along acceptably past its midpoint, but when the third episode drops a stupid leftfield explanation for the Scarborough Fair theme that’s been consistent throughout, then fusses pointlessly with the timeline, then adds some further last minute revelations that can exist only for padding, the whole series just about fell apart with all of its incompetent shoestring construction and my initial suspicions that nothing was going anywhere were just laid bare, exposed, embarrassed that they’d allowed themselves to go so far along without putting on some damned decent clothing.

Conclusion: my suspicions are sultry trollops.  And atmosphere can only shade the plotholes; if you walk us into them, still we will fall.  ‘Remember Me’ causes these falls too often to make it worth the time.