'Thomas Hardy meets The Exorcist'

The Living and The Dead, BBC1, Tuesday 9pm All the Way, Sky Atlantic, Wednesday 9pm

It must be addictive, costume drama on TV, for there can be little other explanation for it. Bonnets and bodices? We love ‘em, whether the actors beneath them are rubbish or not. And, as we all know, attention to period detail somehow far outweighs traditional, legitimate considerations for dramatic success.

Better than most, though, is The Living and The Dead, which begins its six-episode romp through late Victorian mysticism on BBC1 on Tuesday evening. The best way to describe this first instalment is as The Exorcist meets Thomas Hardy meets The Wicker Man meets a Stella Artois ad. It stars Kenneth Branagh-soundalike (a good thing) Colin Morgan as London psychologist Nathan Appleby, who returns to his Somerset farming roots with his wife Charlotte (Charlotte Spencer), where he finds everything is all creepy, especially the apparently haunted/possessed daughter of the local parson, Harriet. Poor old Hattie has been sort of taken over by some long-gone nasty slice of rural life named Abel, “one of the meanest, most godless men I ever had the misfortune to share a flagon with”, according to a fellow yokel (wearing a smock, naturally, in rather a fetching shade of indigo as it happens, fashionable in 1889 I suppose).

So she spends most of the time glaring at people, projectile-spewing bile at them and talking in the usual possessed-but-otherwise-angelic child, low, gravelly voice – a phenomenon first seen in the 1970s and still going strong. Sounding a bit like old Steptoe, she keeps saying “No river for the likes of you”, which is a clue, you see. Are ghosts for real or merely splinters of our own personalities? Hard to say, from this evidence, what creator Ashley Pharaoh (Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars) would like one to suppose. The direction, by Alison Troughton (Dr Who, Torchwood) is effective enough, but much of the action is filmed in the dark – so whether you believe in ghosts or not, they’re quite hard to see either way.

Superbly drawn is the portrait of LBJ in All the Way, the biopic of US President Lyndon Johnson’s first year or so in office, from the assassination of Kennedy, through to his winning the fight for civil rights and his own term as president, winning the election of in 1964 (slogan: "All the Way With LBJ"). It is very very long, but, in a way, nowhere near long enough. If there was a year that changed the face of America and did more than any other in the century before or half century since for racial equality, then that was it. Bryan Cranston, as LBJ, captures his unusual blend of camaraderie and menace, of coarseness and insecurity; a man who wanted to build “the Great Society”, no less. Never since has America had such a dedicated, progressive president, Vietnam or not. A big man with a big story. Do make the two and a half hours for it, give yourself an education and look back at a better class of American politics.