Ashley Pharoah had been writing for film and television for many years before he hit the jackpot when he co-created the time-traveling cop show Life on Mars (2006-2007) and its sequel Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010) with Matthew Graham and Tony Jordan (at the time of writing, a third series, Lazarus, is in development). The Living and the Dead, a supernatural semi-anthology series initially began life as another collaboration with Graham but the latter had to pull out when he started work on the Arthur C. Clarke adaptation Childhood’s End (2015) for SyFy. Pharoah continued on alone and created a hit-and-miss (mostly hit, it must be said) but sadly short-lived series that deserved a better fate than being cancelled after just six episodes.

The series attempted a delicate balancing act across a rope spanning several genres – classic BBC costume drama, ghost story and even science fiction – and just about keeps its footing. There’s an ongoing plotline, hinted at throughout but only fully revealed only in the final episode, but it’s largely standalone stories concerning the lives of pioneering psychologist Nathan (Colin Morgan) and his photographer wife Charlotte Appleby (Charlotte Spencer – both the leads are very good indeed), who decamp from Victorian London to a small village in Somerset, soon inheriting the family home when Nathan’s mother dies. But all is not well in the seemingly bucolic village, the countryside haunted by a variety of ghosts and other inexplicable weirdness that the couple have to deal with each week.

Although never sold as such, it would today be labelled “folk horror” with its emphasis on the supernatural and its interactions with the landscape. It’s Thomas Hardy as Nigel Kneale might have adapted him, a leisurely but often highly evocative series boasting gorgeous locations shot to perfection by cinematographers Matt Gray and Suzie Lavelle. It isn’t entirely original – episodes evoke memories of The Sixth Sense (1999), The Exorcist (1973) and any number of Japanese ghost films – but the direction, handled on the first three episodes by Alice Troughton and the last three by Sam Donovan, invokes a creepy atmosphere from the very first episode. The ghosts are frequently seen in broad daylight, the horrors of possession being brought into respectable Victorian country homes and the threat of industrialisation hanging around the edges of this rural farming community like the most terrifying of all spectres.

There are new ghosts and menaces each week – a group of workhouse children suffocated in a mine, an outbreak of mysterious crop-wrecking black beetles, an embittered luddite, a platoon of ghostly Roundhead troops – with only the merest suggestion here and there that something is tying all this together. The explanation, hinted at by Nathan seeing a very 21st century woman occasionally roaming the house, sets up a science fiction cliffhanger that sadly was never to be resolved. It’s a clever enough ending, one that explains why Nathan goes mad throughout the series and why there are so many ghosts haunting the village unexpectedly, but the last episode feels disappointingly rushed, and ultimately a bit dissatisfying. In fairness, the clues were always there, and it wasn’t terribly hard to work out what was going on – those contrails that Nathan looks at early on in the series aren’t a continuity error but were very deliberately left in – and it at least nudged the series off in a new direction in the final episode, setting up an intriguing set of possibilities for a second series that was sadly never to arrive.

As well as looking lovely – it was shot on various locations in South Gloucestershire – it has an interesting soundtrack too, mostly composed by Bristol-based electronic music duo The Insects, though with some nicely chosen songs scattered here and there. Richard Dyer-Bennet’s 1935 song The Reaper’s Ghost is a recurring motif, but episode one features an appropriately haunting rendition of Irish folk classic She Moved Through the Fair by former Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser, and it’s put to particularly evocative use accompanying the suicide by plough of a villager who has fallen under the spell of the supernatural forces.

So we’re left with just six episodes, written variously by Pharoah, Simon Tyrrell, Robert Murphy and Peter McKenna, but they’re six highly impressive episodes that certainly leave one wanting more. Sadly, the viewing figures weren’t great (the first episode attracted just 3.99 million viewer sand the rest failed to register in the weekly charts), not helped one suspects by the BBC’s decision to broadcast it in the far from spooky month of July. Around Halloween or Christmas, and it might have been better received but dumped in the television dead zone of high summer, when viewers weren’t really in the mood for chilly ghost stories or were out enjoying the light evenings, it never really stood a chance.

The unusual structure might eventually have tripped it up. The Somerset village of The Living and the Dead could have run the risk of becoming to unexplained phenomena what Midsomer was to homicide in Midsomer Murders (1997-), a highly unlikely nexus of weirdness that the writers would have needed to jump through serious hoops to justify. But a second series would have been most welcome. There was some mileage left in the characters and it surely wouldn’t have been all that difficult to think up a way around the “too many ghosts” issue.