| Knock, knock, who’s there?
Ghosts, spirits, ectoplasm? Maybe they exist — just don’t ask Bill Paterson to keep talking about them, says Olly Grant Bill Paterson has had it with ghost stories. Relaxing in his Winnebago on the set of Sea of Souls, the BBC’s popular supernatural franchise, he plays a flat and rather world-weary bat to questions about the paranormal. “I have had a few ‘supernatural’ experiences in my life — but I think that I’ll scream if I read about them in a paper again,” he sighs. When Sea of Souls first emerged in 2004, he used to recount a ghostly story involving his friend and fellow actor, Alex Norton. One morning, Paterson had a dream that Norton would be involved in a car accident in which the wheel fell off; lo, on the very same day, the wheel did fall off Norton’s car (happily, he wasn’t injured). It’s an impressively otherworldly anecdote — though, three years and umpteen interviews later, it’s wearing a bit thin. “I suppose you could call it ESP,” he shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t dismiss the supernatural, I’m just not obsessive about it.” For those who aren’t one of the show’s 5.5 million viewers, Sea of Souls is the BBC’s mystery drama about a university department that investigates the paranormal. The show’s master stroke has been to temper the hokum — voodoo rites, poltergeists, ancient curses — with crisp plots and plausible characters. Key to this is Paterson’s role as Professor Douglas Monaghan, who balances scepticism with open-mindedness, and has a suitably tragic backstory about the death of his wife. In the latest two-parter, the hokum centres on a house in the Highlands, where evidence of old occult dealings allows the story to alternate between 2007 and 1897, when it was occupied by a dodgy psychic called Robert Dunbar (the Primeval star Dougie Henshall). Dunbar belongs to the Golden Dawn, an authentic occult society that flourished in the Victorian era. “There was such an interest in spiritualism at that time,” says Paterson. “Organised religion was at its zenith, and yet science was questioning everything. So people were seeking all sorts of other explanations — and connections to the other world — to explain the forces that govern us.” If TV is a barometer for the modern mind, is something similar going on in 2007? Television has always enjoyed a good transcendental yarn — celebrities queued to appear in The Twilight Zone in the 1960s, and Britain had its own counterpart in Joanna Lumley’s sci-fi schlock Sapphire and Steel in the 1970s. But supernatural shows have surged in popularity in the past decade, inspired by Chris Carter’s The X-Files. In Britain, Sea of Souls has been joined by Afterlife, Hex and the ghost-bothering series Most Haunted. Next week, Ray Stevenson and Joanne Whalley star in another BBC One supernatural one-off called Life Line. America has given us dramas such as Supernatural, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Tru Calling and Dead Like Me, alongside booming sci-fi shows such as Lost, Heroes and The 4400. All of this has surely affected the public mood. A recent survey by The Sun found that 43 per cent of Britons believe that they have been contacted by the dead — or have contacted the dead themselves. Chris French, a psychology professor who has been a script consultant on Sea of Souls, says that the rise of superstition is rooted in insecurity. “Superstitious beliefs tend to occur on occasions of uncertainty,” he says (and he should know because he only ever wears red socks on TV appearances). “In many ways the paranormal world view is pretty positive compared with the materialistic, scientific world view. It answers some of those deep, existential questions that we have about our place in the universe and what makes us special.” A straw poll of Paterson’s co-stars exposes some ghostly beliefs. Neve McIntosh, whose character is seriously spooked in the Highlands house, said that she often saw a ghostly, smiling woman in a red dress at her bedroom door as a child. Henshall talks of a bad experience with a Ouija board in his teens. Paterson says he gets “very strong vibes about buildings and places . . . I once filmed in this old building in Edinburgh, and I just loathed the feeling of the place. We had turned it into a bar but I’d rather have had a drink in a septic tank! It felt malevolent. Afterwards I discovered that it had been built on the site of plague pits and had a long, dark history of haunting. “So I don’t dismiss this stuff. I utterly believe, as Hamlet said, that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy. I’m just not going to come up with any fake stories about it . . .” The Times - April 14th 2007 |
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