Harry Price: Ghost Hunter

I can upon this tv show by accident, never heard of it or Harry Price. I read the reviews, some negative and a few positives. I'm glad to say I'm glad I watched it. The story is not based on Harry Price life, it's not a biography. Writers used his character and wrote a story for entertaining purposes. Would have liked to see this made into a TV series.

A really enjoyable story and resolution. Good characters, plot and acting. Wish it were a series.

Apparently the real Harry Price was a well regarded paranormal investigator who had a reputation for exposing fakes.

This ITV made for television film had all the hallmarks for being a potential pilot to a series. However the very poor ratings it received over the Christmas period makes any series very unlikely.

Rafe Spall played Harry Price dragged out of self exposed exile in the 1920s to look into the case of a leading politician's wife who is displaying bizarre behaviour and having haunting visions of a drowned child in a big house they recently moved into.

Harry Price is adamant that their is a rational explanation to all this. The smarmy politician, who seems to be based partly on David Cameron with his 'we are all in it together' quip near the start of the programme has other motives in engaging Price to look into his wife's strange condition at a politically sensitive time for him.

Well I was not sure what to make of the husband's own behaviour because the character was so badly written which to me lessened a lot of the mystery. He does not want Price snooping around, he does not want him to talk to his wife. He will not even engage medical doctors to treat his wife. Given the way he was behaving over his wife's condition why did anyone reckon he was potential Prime Minister was beyond me!

Price with the assistance of the household's combative maid delves deep onto this mystery but really it was rather shallow, plodding and over-long. When Price is not moping around with memories of his own dead wife or the soldier who killed himself in front of him displays the whizz bang of the modern day Sherlock (I noticed the film had a cameo from David Burke who was Dr Watson version 1 in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series) and the demystification of Jonathan Creek without the humour and agility.

Good plot, lovely performances by all, nice period setting. I, too, wish it had become a regular series, I would have enjoyed that.

I couldn't care less if its not an accurate representation of the real Harry Price, all I know is it's a rollicking good tale well told and acted. Don't understand at all why it wasn't picked up for a series. Far better than anything Mark Gatiss has come up with recently.