According to former BBC Three controller Zai Bennett, fans of The Fades have themselves to blame for Jack Thorne’s superb fantasy drama not being recommissioned. We were too few and too old.

The BBC Three remit aimed to attract 16-34 year olds, Bennett explained at the 2012 Edinburgh International Television Festival. Because The Fades found more love among those with mortgages and middle-age spread than it did with fresh-faced teens and twenty-somethings, it didn’t fulfil that remit.

However much critical acclaim (plaudits from The Guardian, The Telegraph, some website called Den Of Geek) or however many awards (a Bafta for Best Drama, nominations for Best Writer, wins for Best Music and Digital Effects) The Fades received, the kids weren’t down so it had to go. And in the channel’s 2012 cuts following extreme budgetary pressure from that year’s Financial Review, it did.

“The dead, the Fades are walking the earth”

The premise of the series is that a fracture has occurred in the Ascension process between death and the afterlife, leaving a portion of the dead invisibly earth-bound, unable to touch or speak, and growing angrier and more vengeful with each passing year. A group known as the Angelics, to whom the show’s teenage lead is connected, can see these “Fades” and are tasked with battling them when they discover a way to take revenge on the living.