Your Daily Dracula – Keith Lee Castle as Count Dracula, Gerran Howell as Vladimir Dracula, Clare Thomas as Ingrid Dracula, Simon Ludders as Renfield, Young Dracula (2006-14)
Running for five seasons and a total of 66 episodes, CBBC’s Young Dracula is arguably the most successful attempt to do a Dracula TV series – competitors from Don Dracula and Dracula: The Series or Cliffhangers to the Jonathan Rhys Meyers or Claes Bang shows called Dracula tend to manage only one season (optimistically tagged Series One on homevideo releases) … with the odd Latin or Asian soap opera seldom managing to do much better. Only The Munsters – which didn’t run five seasons but did have 70 episodes in its original incarnation – stands as competition, and that wasn’t as Dracula/vampire-focused as this kids’ show. Notionally based on a slim 2002 book by Michael Lawrence but actually created by Danny Robins and Dan Tetsell in its early seasons, Young Dracula changed its format several times, shifting from sit-com to vampire soap and back, expanding and contracting with the budget. Several sets of supporting cast were introduced and dispensed with, but the core Draculas remained.
Keith Lee Castle – a vampire in the Urban Gothic episode ‘Vampirology’, Renfield in a two-part story on Lexx, a goth DJ in Vampire Diary – gives the most sustained performance as Dracula as sit-com Dad (a surprisingly common trope) in any medium, going for a goth rocker look and enormous pettiness. Constantly abusing minion Renfield (Simon Ludders) and treating his children unfairly throughout, this Count is vain, pompous, misogynist, self-deluded, cowardly and fallen from a former demonic grace. A reason for the show’s evolving tone is a constant issue with kids’ TV – the cast insist on growing older, so favoured son Vlad (Gerran Howell), who wants to integrate with regular humans (‘breathers’) even as he copes with his status as Chosen One destined to rule all vampirekind (‘biters’), matures onscreen from early teens to near adulthood and the series has to end finally on his eighteenth birthday.
Though it offers a range of comedy stylings – including a running joke featuring the deep cut of Zoltan (Hound of Dracula) – it has a typical British sit-com edge of tragedy in that it’s a portrait of a horribly dysfunctional family and the curse of primogeniture. Dracula wants son Vlad to be his vampire heir and ignores his older daughter Ingrid (Clare Thomas). While trying to be normal, Vlad does heinous things to people which suggest he might actually be a worse monster while trying to avoid being a vampire … while the deadpan Ingrid is right to be in perpetual seething fury at doing all the things her father wants but still being forever passed over in favour of the ungrateful son. The first two seasons are set in Stokeley, a small town in Wales, where the Dracula family have moved – and revolve around involvement with the locals, especially the Branagh family (with Craig Roberts as vampire fan Robin Branagh) and then a school where a Van Helsing descendent (Terence Maynard) is a teacher who gets ridiculed for his belief in vampires. In many ways, the core of the series is Ingrid – the most sinned-against and sinning character, whose ruthless ambition drives the plot more often than Vlad’s wishy-washy whims.
After a three year gap, the show returned for three more serial-like seasons focused more on vampire clan politics – a bit like Being Human or some stretches of Buffy – as the Draculas move to (and run) a school where humans and vampires try to get along together, and things wind down as various prophecies, old feuds and character arcs come to a head despite a very noticeable budget cut.
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