Devil's in the details

The Devil's Playground. Photo / Supplied

This late-arriving sequel gets off to a satisfyingly mysterious and complex beginning

Devil's Playground (TV1, Sunday, 9.35pm) picks up where the 1976 film, The Devil's Playground, left off, which matters not at all if you haven't seen it, or have long forgotten it. The link is Tom Allen, who was then, in the 1950s, a young Australian boy, struggling with his Catholicism. He was going to become a priest but his vocation failed him and he is now, in the 1980s, a psychiatrist. His wife has died (how she died has, like so much more, yet to be revealed) and he has two children and a thing for Alice, a neighbour, who has a brute of a husband, and whose son, Peter, has gone missing.

Tom is played by Simon Burke, (who played Tom as a boy). He is still a Catholic and is seeing a priest who has been pinching money from a church fund when he is asked to become the Catholic shrink - there are priests with murkier problems than a bit of pilfering.

This is the church attempting to adapt to Vatican II; it has been told to "turn and face the people, literally". Priests are no longer to be distant and revered but of the people - as the bishop notes: "A profound transformation."

"Superman to Clark Kent," suggests Tom, which isn't quite a joke. The church is about to shed some of its secrets and some are very nasty, and human, indeed. There is a shrouded, lurking menace about the machinations of the hierarchy of church and community. Like Broadchurch, to which comparisons have inevitably been made, Devils' Playground is about a close-knit community about to be torn apart - a profound transformation - after the discovery of Peter's body, in a lake.

There is loss of innocence and faith and, like with Broadchurch, or any good murder mystery, many questions still to be answered. Strange characters wander in and out of the shadows, a role for which the priests, in their arcane vestments and black cassocks, appear perfectly cast. They are the new church, in new times, but they are still of some other, older time when there weren't punks and Space Invader parlours and before squash was the hot game.

It is the 80s, so there is squash and Spacey parlours and street kids in squats on the Cross and priests smoke and nobody blinks an eye. This is now period detail (how very strange that all seems!) and is perfectly done, even if it feels a bit like looking at the stage on which you once lived and took for granted and is now almost completely alien. There are payphones, with slots to put money in, and a dial, of all things.

We know there will be sexual abuse but beyond that nothing is clear and every character's motives are as unknowable as a secret in a confessional - which makes for a gripping beginning.

- TimeOut