And so it was last night that I spent and hour and a half watching the station’s modern ‘reworking’ of the Frankenstein tale. Replacing Dr Victor Frankenstein with Victoria (how very clever), the one-off drama updated the story by making the titular doctor a genetic scientist. So instead of gathering body parts and sticking them together in a Mr Potato-head fashion, she manages to grow a monster from human DNA. For an extra bit of silliness, it’s the DNA of her dead ten-year-old son. As well as the sledgehammer approach to the subject of genetic engineering, Frankenstein was also badly paced and generally unconvincing. Victoria’s compassion for the monster was just plain annoying, as the rational response was surely ‘Shoot the fucking thing in the head, and lets go get a curry.’ Still, there’s always the special effects to save the day, right? No, sadly not, because while the monster didn’t look fake, it was about as scary as a Care Bears omnibus. Clearly, the producers wanted to invoke sympathy, but having what was effectively a stretched-out version of ET seems like a misjudgement to me.
