Bedlam   Starring: Theo James, Will Young, Charlotte Salt, Ashley Madekwe and Hugo Speer 2 Entertain RRP: £20.42 2EDVD0652 Certificate: 15 Available 18 April 2011

Welcome to Bedlam Heights, a hip newly converted apartment building on the edge of a British metropolis. The high quality rental apartments offer stylish 21st century living, but behind the facade lie unimaginable horrors. For this former pre-Victorian asylum is haunted by the ghosts of its dark and violent past...

Bedlam is an intriguing supernatural series... until you sit down and start to think too much about it. There are too many unanswered questions (like why in the first episode is Jed capable of hitching a ride with a phantom car and its driver and able to communicate with the dead man as simply as talking to any living person, but as the series starts we soon learn that Jed can only sense things and not actually communicate fully with the dead?

So what's the series all about? Kate (Charlotte Salt) has been working with her father, Warren (Hugo Speer), to renovate the former asylum into the latest in modern living. She's also bagged herself a rather stylish flat in to the bargain which she now shares with best mates Molly (Ashley Madekwe) and Ryan (Will Young). That's until Kate's troubled cousin, Jed (Theo James) turns up. He says he just needs a place to crash, but the creepy goings on at Bedlam Heights soon start to get under his skin. With a history of mental illness, he's a troubled man who sees ghosts, visions of the dead and the past. He's convinced Kate is in danger from the spooks of Bedlam, but unbeknown to him, the truth will be far more terrifying... Can he really 'save' Kate? And from whom, or what, does she need saving?

When Ryan discovers that Jed can "see dead people" the two begin working together to uncover the ghosts of the past that are haunting the new tenants of Bedlam Heights. It would appear that the dead spirits of some of the tortured inmates of the asylum are dragging in ghosts that are somehow related to the new flat owners. Warren is also hiding something from everyone. It was his father who ran the original asylum, and was eventually arrested for torturing the residents. Many unanswered questions remain about what actually went on in the asylum, things that Warren seems to be privy to.

For me the biggest problem was that the storylines have been done to death (if you'll excuse the pun), and better, elsewhere: The ghost of a child that haunts a living child; an ex-girlfriend back from the dead for revenge; and ghosts that are hanging around in order to make sure the person who accidentally killed them is brought to justice.

The acting is universally faultless and the onscreen chemistry works well with the characters. If you you don't question the show too much you'll enjoy the mystery and suspense, just don't expect anything original.

7

Darren Rea