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More than four decades after British comedy legend Eric Morecambe dreamed up a vampire who didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the undead, The Reluctant Vampire is finally making the leap to television.
The six-episode BBC comedy premieres Sunday, October 4, with all episodes becoming available on BBC iPlayer that morning and the premiere airing later that day on BBC One. BAFTA-winning Am I Being Unreasonable? star Lenny Rush plays Val, a young man raised as part of a traditional vampire family who has always suspected there might be something different about him. Turns out there is: Val isn’t a vampire at all. He’s human.
That creates a particularly awkward situation considering his father, Victor (Tom Davis), is devoted to vampire tradition and expects his son to follow in his undead footsteps. Val’s mother, Valeeta (Fleabag‘s Sian Clifford), already knows the truth, while his suspicious brother Vernon (Gabriel Nagy) isn’t exactly eager to make life easier for him.
The series follows Val as he secretly ventures into the nearby village to learn more about humans — and ultimately what it means to be one — while continuing to perform the vampire duties expected of him at home.
From Morecambe and Wise to Vampires
The show’s unlikely origins stretch back to 1982. Eric Morecambe was, of course, one half of Morecambe and Wise, one of Britain’s most celebrated comedy teams. But late in his career, Morecambe was increasingly interested in writing. Following his adult novel Mr Lonely, he turned to younger readers with The Reluctant Vampire.
The book introduced an unconventional Vampire Prince whose tastes didn’t exactly match those of his blood-drinking family. Rather than blood, he preferred chips and red wine.
Morecambe followed it with The Vampire’s Revenge, which continued the story with Prince Vernon escaping from the statue in which he’d been imprisoned and setting out for revenge. Both books have been republished in connection with the new television adaptation.
Morecambe died in 1984, never seeing his vampires make it to the screen. But his son Gary Morecambe, who serves as a script consultant on the BBC series, says a screen adaptation was something his father wanted.
“Dad would definitely have gone on to write more books,” Gary told Radio Times, explaining that writing was becoming an increasingly important part of his father’s career. More than 45 years after his father first conceived the idea, Gary added that Eric “would have been absolutely thrilled” to see it become a television series.
How Ghosts Helped Resurrect The Reluctant Vampire
There’s another interesting connection between The Reluctant Vampire and one of Britain’s biggest supernatural comedy successes. Producer Shane Allen read Morecambe’s novel as a child and became obsessed with it. Years later, as the BBC’s controller of comedy commissioning, Allen helped champion Ghosts despite concerns that its supernatural premise might seem more suited to children’s television. The success of Ghosts got him thinking about the vampire book he’d loved growing up.
Allen approached the Morecambe estate and eventually brought in brothers Rob and Neil Gibbons, whose credits include Alan Partridge, to adapt it. The Gibbons brothers didn’t attempt to simply reproduce Morecambe’s novel across six episodes. Instead, they retained its central idea and characters while expanding them into a television sitcom.
“We wanted to be faithful to the manic spirit of Eric’s work,” Rob Gibbons explained to Radio Times, rather than simply stretching the book across six installments.
The resulting series was built around Rush as Val and a large ensemble of British comedy performers. In addition to Davis and Clifford, the cast includes Charlie Cooper and Esther Smith as villagers determined to rid the area of vampires, Ellie May Sheridan as their daughter Gertie, who befriends Val, Asim Chaudhry as the vampire family’s assistant Igon and Joe Wilkinson as Wilf the Werewolf. And because apparently vampires and werewolves aren’t enough, Bill Bailey and Ross Noble play a pair of stone gargoyles.
A Different Kind of Vampire Story
Despite all the monsters, The Reluctant Vampire isn’t being presented as a horror series. It’s a family comedy built around a familiar coming-of-age problem given a supernatural twist: What happens when the person your family expects you to become isn’t who you actually are?
The production was filmed in Gloucestershire and comes from Boffola Pictures in co-production with Germany’s ZDFneo. Emily McDonald directs, with Rob and Neil Gibbons writing all six half-hour episodes.
For Gary Morecambe, though, the series represents something more personal — the fulfillment of an idea his father never had the chance to see realized. And after more than four decades, Eric Morecambe’s very reluctant vampire is finally ready to come out of his coffin.