Platform 7, ITVX
Ghosts are such a common device in drama that a quick Google search will give you the top 50 movies featuring the supernatural in seconds.
However, for some reason, Platform 7 struggles to make it work.
Perhaps it’s the lumpy script or some technical reason I haven’t picked up, but the involvement of the undead in this drama falls flat.
Thirty-year-old Lisa appears to have killed herself at a train station and is forced to walk the platforms in perpetuity with no real understanding of what happened.
She’s still in her nightclothes because that’s how she died under the wheels of a train.
Despite a corner deciding that mental health issues were at play, suicide doesn’t make sense to some of her friends.
We meet Lisa for the first time on her one-year anniversary, when her parents and boyfriend come to the station to lay flowers at the scene.
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She can stand beside them and speak, but they can neither hear nor see her.
Enter Edward, who takes his own life in the same way and now Lisa has another spirit walking the platforms whom she can at least converse with.
They discuss their situation and Lisa’s determination to find out what events led her to the train tracks.
Fortunately for Lisa, a local transport police officer takes an interest in her case and, despite incurring the ire of his supervisor (as is traditional in TV cop drama), investigates it as if a suspected murder.
Her second big break comes when following the arrival of her parents and boyfriend, the spirit world allows her to leave the station for the first time.
Free to wander Peterborough she passes through doors to watch her parents in grief, stare lovingly at her boyfriend as he sleeps and visit her best friend since primary school.
Snippets of the evening of her death return to her memory and she’s convinced she did not take her own life. Something happened, dammit.
The police officer agrees, but surprisingly decides the most important person to convince is the customer service supervisor at the station.
He develops the theory that the gifted, but probably autistic, doctor who shared a flat with Lisa’s boyfriend is the figure who may have chased her to the station.
It made no sense to him (and he produced a hand-drawn map of the possible routes from her flat to the station to prove it) that Lisa would take the long way to the station and then climb over a metal fence to get to the tracks rather than walk in the front gate.
Meanwhile, we learn that Edward killed himself because he was about to be exposed as a paedophile after his family discovered that he had abused his own daughter.
Lisa played detective by listening in on a family conversation while they visited the station café.
Imagine having one person in the world who you can speak to and then you find out this.
Obviously in television drama the first suspect is never the culprit so you can exclude the socially awkward flat mate.
I don’t want to spoil the reveal for anyone planning on watching, just to say that it’s not an edge of the seat moment.
Overall, Platform 7, which is based on a best-selling book no less, is ponderous and way too morose for these dark nights.
Two gruesome suicides and a pedophile reveal in under two episodes is too much for me.
And despite the sense of some connection to the ghosts of A Christmas Carol, Platform 7 is not for the festive season.
