Sea of Souls BBC1, 9pm
Horizon BBC2, 9pm
It's easy to get ghost stories wrong on TV. Take Number 13, the MR James adaptation starring Greg Wise that was on at Christmas - my mother hooted with laughter all the way through it. I couldn't blame her - it was about as frightening as Dad's Army and twice as camp.
But Sea of Souls last night got it right, providing a rollicking good spookfest that left you wishing you could switch straight to digital for part two. It's not that its tale of the Victorian occult was remotely convincing - that would be too much to hope for - but its shameless use of traditional chiller tactics created a creepy atmosphere so effectively that you couldn't help getting pulled in.
It all began with a recently bereaved young couple, Karen and Ian O'Rourke, starting a new life in remote Argyll, an excuse for some ravishing pictures of lochs and glens that must have delighted VisitScotland. Oh joy - they had bought a huge derelict house, Glenmore, with the intention of turning it into a hotel.
Naturally they arrived in the middle of the night. Mist swirled and the wind blew up eddies of dry leaves as they drove down the overgrown single track road leading to Glenmore House. Eventually, they arrived at a tall cast iron gate, the headlights illuminating a crouching stone angel to one side. Leaving the car, torch in hand, they picked their way up to the imposing house. Inside, it was a cathedral of shadows, with long, dusty oak-lined passageways and a kitchen full of collapsing units.
Not much happened that first night, but then doors started slamming and radios switching themselves on. It wasn't long before that wonderfully comforting presence, Prof Douglas Monaghan (Bill Paterson), was rapping on the door, overnight bag in one hand, ghost camera in the other.
Neve McIntosh was great as grieving young mother Karen O'Rourke and Ben Miles suitably down-to-earth as her protective husband Ian. The house's former owner Robert Dunbar (Dougie Henshall), whom we saw in flashbacks, was weird but not exactly sinister. Maybe he wasn't meant to be - we shall find out in part two. But it's Bill Paterson who makes Sea of Souls, a gentle benevolent father figure who secretly believes in fairy stories. Bring on another series.
The premise of Horizon's Battle of the Brains sounded a little too much like IQ Idol: seven people at the top of their professions, competing in a battery of tests to see who was the most intelligent. What would be next - Graham Norton hosting University Challenge?But no, far from it. This was Horizon at its best: informative, inventive, thought-provoking and 100% tantrum free.
The idea was to look at the whole issue of intelligence testing to see if the century-old IQ method is still the best yardstick or whether other systems, or a group of different systems such as emotional intelligence and practical problem solving, might give a more accurate assessment.
The contestants, who included an artist, a 14-year-old musical genius, a pilot, a testing expert with an IQ of 162 and a quantum physicist, were rated according to each test and then given a final score. You could see at once why the IQ test could be unfair - Stella, the artist who'd left school at 13 and had no formal education at all, was at an immediate disadvantage when asked about the meanings of certain words. But she came out better than anyone in the problem-solving task.
In the end, the joint winners were quantum physicist Seth, an impressive all-rounder who'd got the best IQ score too, and the dramatist Bonnie Greer, who was not even in the top three for IQ. Seth declared that, to be honest, he regarded the tests as silly but that he'd like to thank the BBC for introducing him to such a great group of people. Good old Horizon, the antidote to reality TV.
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