Spring is here! Trees are coming into verdant leaf, plants are in full bud, begging to be let bloom, all is fresh, green, vibrant, full of hope and promise … For all those temperamentally disinclined to all this uplifting nonsense, however, there is ITV's new drama Safe House, starring Christopher Eccleston as former police protection officer Robert, who is haunted by a past case and now trying to make a new start with his wife, Katy (Marsha Thomason), in the gloomiest, most forbidding house in the gloomiest, most forbidding part of Cumbria. Here, he swims daily in the freezing waters of Lake Torment and gives Scafell Pike a run for its money in the silently brooding stakes. Robert and Katy intend to run the house as a B&B. This does not really seem, to the viewer peering at a screen awash in various shades of slate and suffering,(Farrow & Ball really should do an actor range – Eccleston Grey, Lewis Red, Cumberbatch Pallor), to be a goer. Apart from the sodden landscape, Robert does not exude the effortless bonhomie of the natural host (see above. Haunted. Torment. Brooding. Eccleston).
The Guardian