The Fades: celebrating a BBC 3 classic.

In the wake off cancelled TV shows, and the true spirit of ‘fan power’ our beloved shows are coming back to us, once again, on new channels and platforms willing to take a punt on original content.

But it wasn’t always the case.

If you can believe it, according to former BBC Three controller Zai Bennett, fans of The Fades have themselves to blame for Jack Thorne’s superb 2011 fantasy drama not being re-commissioned.

We were too few and too old.

The show aimed to attract 16-34 year olds, but The Fades found more love among those with mortgages and middle-age spread than it did with teens and twenty-somethings.

The Fades was my favourite show from 2011. Actually, I don’t remember anything remotely as fun as that, and that includes boring Walking Dead and bloody Spartacus (yay, Crixus!).

With great writing, a strong cast and a gripping story, Jack Thorne’s 2011 supernatural drama The Fades was one of the best… the show was a 6.5 magnitude above anything that year and Culturedemandsgeeks glad we finally see horror eye to horror eye on something.

The premise of the series is that a fracture has occurred in the Ascension process between death and the afterlife, leaving a portion of the dead invisibly earth-bound, unable to touch or speak, and growing angrier and more vengeful with each passing year.

A group known as the Angelics, to whom the show’s teenage lead is connected, can see these “Fades” and are tasked with battling them when they discover a way to take revenge on the living.

There’s a simple reason that older viewers couldn’t stay away from the show: it was brilliant. Clever, funny, scary and imaginative with skilfully written characters who felt as real as the grey-clouded town they lived in.

The Fades’ determination to ground its fantasy story in the normal world was one of its key achievements. The tale of a young person stumbling upon a hidden supernatural world existing in parallel to their own, one in which they turns out to play a powerful part.

The central two such characters were Paul and Mac, the geeky seventeen-year-olds whose friendship forms the emotional backbone of The Fades. Played by Iain De Caestecker and Daniel Kaluuya, talented actors who’ve since gone on to major films and high-profile Marvel TV success, Paul and Mac were written and performed with immense wit and heart.

Though their friendship is platonic, scenes between them are peppered with rom-com moments. In one, Paul surprises Mac outside his bedroom window with a repentant display for forgetting his birthday, and bountiful others, too.

Also, Paul and Mac were geeks. They were sci-fi, fantasy, movie and comic book fans, and unlike geeks portrayed elsewhere on TV, convinced as real sci-fi, fantasy, movie and comic book fans.

From Hertfordshire boroughs to scarier territory; The Fades was equally successful as a horror. Directors Farren Blackburn and Tom Shankland and their design teams tease every scare and stomach-turn they could from its story.

The Fades’ introduction to Mac and Paul, which sees them break into a disused shopping centre, establishes the show’s horror leanings. What follows are abandoned buildings full of creepy corridors and things lurking in the shadows…

Writer Jack Thorne imported a youthful cast from his previous show, Skins. The cast assembled for The Fades was also full of pleasant surprises, Lily Loveless and Joe Dempsie, who played villain John in the BBC Three paranormal drama, Sophie Wu, and Daniel Kaluuya.

While the adult cast boasted Johnny Harris, Daniela Nardini, Tom Ellis and Dormer from Game of Thrones fame.

Those capable performers brought Thorne’s characters to life in a grounded and compelling way, whether they were playing history teachers or decades-dead resurrected vampiric-monsters.

It was such a strong ensemble performance and I think [creator] Jack Thorne is someone who, if you’ve got the chance to delve into his brain at any point, then you should just grab it with both hands.

The whole cast worked wonders on the one-season hit show, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough!

According to interviews, creator Jack Thorne had plans for a further two series.

And by the end of the first six-episode run, it’s obvious that there’s cruel potential for more from this compelling world hidden within our world.

Hopefully, with the rise of Netflix and other platforms, we may even see a re-make of this quirky, English supernatural drama, sometime in the future!