The Fades is a six-episode television series originally broadcast on BBC 3 from September 2011 to October 2011. (Only minor spoilers follow)

 

Ghosts roam a town, searching for the point on earth where their souls can ascend. The problem is, some cannot leave and are stuck here. The worse problem is that one has learned how to feast on humans and become solid, a sort of invincible vampire zombie, and he's teaching other ghosts how to do the same. Fortunately, there’s a group of people with psychic or healing powers called the Angelics who fight these Fades. Unfortunately, almost all of the good ones die in the first episode. But what’s this? A bedwetting introvert who’s the twin brother of the High School prima donna seems to also have these powers and can be trained to save the world.

So far, so Buffy, yet as has been shown in Being Human (another BBC 3 show) and in series 3 of the Dr. Who spin-off Torchwood, if you get a good damn script and savvy actors you end up with damn scary stuff mixed with spot-on bust-your-gut humour. In The Fades case, it was created and written by Jack Thorne, a writer on the shows Skins and the television version of This is England, resulting in fully drawn characters that you can relate to or loathe, in situations that become more and more far-fetched, but more exciting as a result. Mix in references to, for example, The Matrix, Alien(s), Night/Dawn/Return of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead II, and… Mork and Mindy and you get a hell of a lot of fun.

There’s a gun-toting female vicar, ejaculation that causes angel’s wings to sprout, many main characters being killed off at the moment when you really don’t want them to, moths emerging from mouths, and a very scary bad guy who looks like Cillian Murphy’s cherubic younger brother.

 

4 breasts + boob grope. Pillow smothering sex. Death by evisceration, dismemberment, lorry out of nowhere, axe to the head and holy fire. Gnarl Bob sez check it out.