See more Daily Mail on Google - save us as a Preferred SourceBy CHARLOTTE DEAN, ASSOCIATE SHOWBIZ EDITOR Published: 22:28 BST, 26 August 2026 | Updated: 22:30 BST, 26 August 2026
Bookish (U&Albi)Rating: One starRating:For a man who relishes the macabre so much that he’s renowned for his ghost stories on the Beeb at Christmas, actor Mark Gatiss seems surprisingly hostile to spiritualism.As the 1940s detective Gabriel Book, in Bookish, he dropped his usual arch and winsome mannerisms to savage all mediums and psychics — calling them, ‘filthy, crooked, mendacious, disgusting pigs’.Gatiss, who wrote the screenplay as well as starring in it, apparently doesn’t have much time for conventional religion either: ‘If there is a God, He is a cruel and abhorrent thing,’ he snarled.And if we were still in any doubt about his opinions, he staged a fake seance to disabuse a few believers in the hereafter. ‘It’s extraordinary what tosh people believe,’ he sneered. For a man who relishes the macabre so much that he’s renowned for his ghost stories on the Beeb at Christmas, actor Mark Gatiss (pictured) seems surprisingly hostile to spiritualismHis loathing is evidently real, but it seems a strange contradiction from a performer who has often relied on viewers’ instinctive attraction to the supernatural — in his superb 2020 retelling of the Dracula story, for instance.Mr Sneed, the unhappy medium in this two-part murder mystery, was certainly a fake, and a blackmailer to boot. But the plot could have been more intriguing if Gatiss had allowed elements of the paranormal to seep in, as they so often will when people hold seances, whether in earnest or not.Much of the dialogue consisted of Book airily pontificating to the minor characters, such as Mrs Book (Polly Walker), whose role is to stand around in open-mouthed awe at his ability to quote Dickens and Moliere.Jason Watkins played Sneed, with a black wig sliding off the back of his head like Ozzy Osbourne in a wind tunnel. When the lights came up after a seance, he was discovered with a knife embedded in his heart — with a dead man’s fingerprints on the haft, which was a clever touch.But from the moment we discovered that the psychic’s assistant (Saffron Coomber) sitting opposite him was a former circus artiste, it was obvious who threw the knife — especially after she flicked a stick of chalk at Book’s sidekick, Jack (Connor Finch), with the same deft twist of the wrist.The show’s real problem is Book himself, a cold and tiresomely self-satisfied character who looks, in the rare moments when he isn’t talking, like Larry Grayson sucking a lemon drop.We’re meant to believe the police allow him to investigate crimes because of his friendship with Inspector Bliss (Elliot Levey). But that ruse only works when, as in Grantchester, there’s a close bond between the amateur sleuth and the professional detective.When Book enquired after Bliss’s wife, it was plain the two barely knew each other.After two-and-a-half hours, Simon Callow lifted the whole show with a brief cameo as a spymaster, complete with eyepatch. Effortlessly full of intrigue, he was like a character from a Le Carre novel popping up in Midsomer Murders.
