Dr "Who?" and Mr Hyde

On the Saturday night at the beginning of our week on Lindisfarne, durham_rambler and I were in fine holiday mood; and by the time we'd demolished a bowlful of nuts and a bottle of wine over Doctor Who, and the rest of the bottle and the start of another over dinner, we were in the mood to sit back and let the television entertain us. So we let Ian Rankin's documentary on Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde deliver us into some new BBC series about which we knew nothing, yet another updating of that old story, called Jekyll: and it was good enough that we took care to watch the next episode the following week, and the next - and I'm looking forward to the next installment tomorrow. It's clever, scary and witty - and hang on a minute, isn't that Meera Syal? And Dennis Lawson?

So how come everyone else isn't talking about it? I'm accustomed to everyone else being ahead of me when it comes to tv: LJ friends in the States have usually seen even BBC stuff before I have (I'm just now catching up with the repeats of the first episodes of Life on Mars, for example). And Jekyll is exactly the sort of thing I would expect to appeal to people: a classic dark fantasy story given a smart new updating by Steven Moffat, who wrote the most praised episodes of the last couple of seasons of Doctor Who.

Someone is doing all the right things to publicise Jekyll: there's an LJ community (jekyll_bbc), with some interesting background, there are a bunch of previews on YouTube. Yet when I asked the Graphic Novels Reading Group about it, there was a certain amount of muttering, one person who had half thought of watching it and then done something else instead, and the explanation that it was impossible to watch it because James Nesbitt had been in a very annoying Yellow Pages advertisement.