Dracula:A Love Like Blood.

"Why does death come always come as such a shock to mortals?" - Count Dracula.

BBC1's recent three part adaptation of Dracula, c/o Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, certainly got the Internet talking - and, for the most part, not in a particularly positive way. It's pointless to say it divided people because every fucking thing divides people these days (that seems to be pretty how much Twitter and Facebook work, or at least the key to their success) but there's no doubting it did.

By the time I'd caught up with it on the iPlayer I'd read so many contrasting takes, mostly negative though my friend and Belfast correspondent John Patrick Higgins (who I must credit with nicking a few of his ideas and riffing on them for this piece) valiantly flew the flag for this new Drac - at least until the third episode when even he lost patience with the in-jokes, self-referential smugness, and possibly the least convincing nightclub scenes filmed since Basic Instinct.

Less charitably, I read people complaining of Gatiss' current ubiquity and how he ruins everything by covering it with a veneer of archness and irony. One commentator (an ex-member of the band Hefner) even called Gatiss the Bobby Gillespie of television, suggesting that just because Gatiss likes good things it doesn't mean he IS good things. That was a reply to a Facebook comment from an ex-member of the band Kenickie (the indie pop royalty were lining up to diss the Count) who complained that the adaptation was "baws". Something, being over thirty and not Scottish, I had to consult the Urban Dictionary on.

Lucy Mangan, writing in The Guardian, gave it five stars (as she did The Virtues and Chimerica, she's generous in her star giving, that Lucy) but when she was on Christmas University Challenge she barely said a word so is she a person we can trust? As it went, despite (or maybe because of) going in with all this baggage, I liked it.

Yeah, I said it! I thought it was good. Okay, it wasn't as chilling as some of the classic Hammers but I enjoyed it far more than I did Francis Ford Coppola's pompously titled Bram Stoker's Dracula twenty-eight (wtf!?) years ago. Claes Bang played the titular vampire as if Pierce Brosnan couldn't decide if Dracula should err more towards Ray Reardon or Dave Vanian of The Damned, but his erudite manner, corny jokes, and dashing looks were offset brilliantly by his insatiable lust for blood and, obviously, his creepy oddness.

When we first meet him he looks more like an ageing vocalist of a Norwegian death metal band or Michael Gira from Swans after a four day bender. That's in 1897. In his big castle. Which he describes to the unfortunate visitor Jonathan Harker as "a labyrinth of stairs and doors, and shadows" but there's also, as you might expect, lots of broken mirrors, unseen crying babies, zombies, and nightmares. As well as wine. Blood red wine. Obviously.

"Dreams are a haven where we can sin without consequence" - Count Dracula.

In a fly infested nunnery, on the outskirts of Budapest, John Hefferman's now emaciated and skeletal looking Jonathan Harker is recounting his time spent at Dracula's castle in Transylvania to Sister Agatha Van Helsing (agreed, by all I've consulted, to be the very best thing in the series). Stagecoaches in the snow, typed out billets-doux, enough candles to further endanger the bee population, and, of course, bats. In the belfry. Probably.

Harker's there, ostensibly, to discuss Drac's plans to buy Carfax Abbey. But it's not long before he realises he's on the menu too. The dish of the day. Gatiss and Moffat really go to town when it comes to giving Bang's Dracula a steady flow of food, dining, and sanguinary related puns and if, at times, they come a bit too thick and fast, at least Bang's delivery errs just on the right side of hammy.

It must have been difficult for Bang to resist an arch eyebrow lift a la Roger Moore as he voices lines about "fresh blood", "flavour", and Harker looking "rather drained". Later on he'll spit out zingers about working with a "skeleton crew" and how he just wants "something to eat and a little bit of company".

As Michael Gira's grandfather morphs into Pierce Brosnan's Dave Vanian, a kind of Benjamin Button routine which Harker has to undergo in reverse, the puns come thicker and faster and, yet, the Count is not without menace and the series is not without horror. Admittedly, it's a camp, schlocky horror more akin to a ride on a ghost train than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it's fun nonetheless.

"There are those among us destined to scratch at their coffin lids for all eternity" - Count Dracula.

The game of spot the reference would have been unbearable if you'd seen this at the BFI (as would the four and a half hours running length without a toilet break). That knowing, theatre, laughter that people do not because they've heard something that's funny but because they want you to know they've understood a, presumably obscure, reference.

Ugh. But on television, in the relative comfort of my own front room, it wasn't so painful. I spotted Silence of the Lambs, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Exorcist, An American Werewolf in London, The Seventh Seal, and The Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy video but I don't doubt there were more. The Inside No. 9 nod was, for me, just a bit too self-referential. That's the sort of thing that, if people don't like you anyway, really gets folk's backs up.

"Please avert your eyes. I have to murder a child. As we used to say in Vladivostok" - Count Dracula.

It was more than compensated for by the bravura performance of Dolly Wells. A nun who doesn't believe in God ("like many women my age, I'm trapped in a loveless marriage and keeping up appearances to maintain a roof over my head"), she is not only given many of the best lines, but delivers them with both a confidence and a panache that suggests she knows this whole venture is pretty silly but she's going to give it her all.

Like Christopher Lee would have done. Sister Agatha is every bit Dracula's equal. They have a love/hate relationship that lasts for over six centuries and he appears as much in awe of her self-control as she is fascinated by his transgressive behaviour. Which, considering at one point it's suggested he once ate Mozart, is understandable!

"Faith is a sleeping draught for children and simpletons" - Sister Agatha Van Helsing.

There's a neat twist regarding Harker's fiancee Mina (Morfydd Clark) in the first episode and there's an unseen (the camera chooses to pan politely away leaving our imagination to fill in the blanks) but presumably grisly decapitation that might give younger viewers nightmares yet when a horrific skin mask is ripped from the vampire's face it looks, to all the world, like a banned episode of Scooby Doo.

The ship that Dracula sails to England on, too, is not without its cartoon like qualities. The Demeter's crew and passenger list is a motley assortment, for sure. There's Captain Sokolov (Jonathan Aris channeling Captain Haddock), Dr Sharma (Sacha Dhawan, great), the undead deckhand Piotr (Samuel Blenkin appears to have taken a wrong turn on the way to audition for the part of a hobbit), the learned Adisa (an elegant performance from Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), there's Patrick Walsh McBride (who can't help but look like a young George Osborne in the role of Lord Ruthven), and there's Youssef Kerkour's Olgaren who's come as Grange Hill's Bullet Baxter after an unfortunate accident with a threshing machine.

"What happened after you were murdered?" - Sister Agatha Van Helsing.

The first episode flits between Transylvania and Hungary, the second we're all at sea, and, for the third, we arrive in Britain. Not just Britain but modern Britain. A Britain of fridges, caravans, widescreen televisions, WiFi, and Skype. This was the episode that had lost even the hitherto most devoted of admirers and going in with more heat than I had light I wasn't expecting much.

I kept waiting for it to get really crap but, for me, it never quite happened. Sure, Dracula with a gun looked a bit daft and Gatiss' cameo as Dracula's lawyer, Frank Renfield (with echoes of the accident prone League of Gentlemen vet Mr Chinnery, I thought), seemed unnecessary but I didn't mind the scenes in which it appeared Dracula had walked straight into an episode of Hollyoaks and I wasn't even averse to the reappearance of Dolly Wells as a high ranking scientist working at the Jonathan Harker Foundation.

Lydia West was brilliant (as she was, last year, in Russell T Davies' mindblowing Years and Years) as Lucy Westenra and although her group of friends were less impressive:- Matthew Beard as the soppy romantic Jack, Phil Dunster as lazy Texan cliche Quincey, and Andy Bell from Erasure, sorry John McCrea, as Zev, Lucy's gay best friend.

Everything comes to a head during Lucy's hen weekend in London and if the tying up of loose ends was maybe a tiny bit too neat I felt the concluding scenes were tense, dramatic, camp, silly, and actually pretty decent. I seem to stand alone there and, in that, I surprised myself. Not least because I've always been more of a Frankenstein man.

I'd long considered Frankenstein to be a more interesting story but as this series developed I found myself, at one point, thinking about how vampirism is not so different to the Christianity that, in the story, so vehemently opposes it. And vica versa. That a vampire can offer you eternal life if you sacrifice your beliefs and invite them in is not so different to the basic tenets of Christianity but in fact a close, or you may prefer to say blood, relation.

The vanity of small differences! Was the Gatiss/Moffat the best thing I've ever seen? No, not by a country mile. But was it the unmitigated pile of self-congratulatory shit that so many Internet observers claimed it to be? Absolutely not. It wasn't even 'baws'.

It might not have been pure dead brilliant either but it was an enjoyable watch, a worthwhile addition to the ever expanding library of Dracula adaptations, and, in the performances of Lydia West, Claes Bang, and, most of all, Dolly Wells it steered a fine line between out and out pantomime and horror. I enjoyed it - and if you want to hate me for it, go ahead.

"I'm undead. I'm not unreasonable" - Count Dracula.