Every Rose Has Its Thorn:Red Rose.

"Roses are red, violets are blue. I'm here in the garden waiting for you"

Christ alive! Red Rose is scary. I was less than four minutes into the first of eight episodes when the first chill went up my back. It was far from the last. At one point I was so chilled to the bone I considered putting the radiator on. During a heatwave.

There's even some proper old school horror frights that will, quite likely, see you jump out of your seat. I'd forgotten how much fun that is. Red Rose (BBC3/iPlayer, created by Michael and Paul Clarkson) is set in and around Bolton and tells the story of a group of school leavers and what happens to them in what should be one of the most enjoyable times of anybody's life. That long, seemingly endless, post-exam summer.

You know the sort of things that happen. People sign each other's school shirts (and draw dicks on them too, of course), they smoke, they drink, they party (or they get upset because they've not been invited to any parties), they snog each other, and they argue about Jaffa Cakes. But, of course, things don't quite pan out like that for Rochelle, Wren, Ashley, Noah, Anthony, Taz, and Jaya.

Rochelle, or Roch (Isis Hainsworth) has lost her mum and lives with her dad Vinny (Samuel Anderson). They're struggling. Money's tight and Roch often has to look after her young twin sisters while Vinny's away working. Often they have no money for the electricity meter and we see Roch visit food banks.

When she downloads the Red Rose app to her phone, it looks - initially - as if it may be the answer to many of her problems. Red Rose asks Roch how she feels and if she needs help. It asks her to write her wishes on the mirror with lipstick and then, mysteriously, the meter is topped up. Red Rose's largesse doesn't end there. With a big party imminent, Roch has nothing to wear. Soon a sparkly dress and a pair of Jimmy Choo trainers appear.

Roch's best friend Wren (Amelia Clarkson) also lives with her mum, Rachel (Natalie Gavin), as well as working part time in her coffee and cake shop. Unbeknown to Rachel, Wren is meeting her estranged father Rick (Adam Nagaitis) in a local graveyard and she's also started a relationship with school friend Noah (Harry Redding).

Noah's best friend Anthony (Ellis Howard) is a kind lad but he's got a tough home life. His mum, Andrea (Jennifer Hennessy) drinks so heavily there's only about two hours a day, in the morning, when he can have a reasonable conversation with her. It's left to him, most of the time, to look after little brother Liam (Leo Ashton). On top of that, he's coming to terms with his own sexuality.

Ashley (Natalie Blair) is more confident. She gives as good as she gets when it comes to banter but has what appears to be, and is, a slightly weird obsession with Princess Diana. Most of the ribbing she gets comes from Taz (Ali Khan) who clearly dishes it out only because he likes her. Taz himself is on the receiving end of many a ribbing himself.

Jaya (Ashna Rabheru) is, to begin with, an outlier. She's not one of the Dickheads (as the gang's WhatsApp group has it) but she soon starts to win the others over with both her kindness and her extraordinary knowledge of coding and how the Internet works. Jaya is very smart and rarely joins the others in drinking and partying.

It falls, primarily, to Jaya to work out how Red Rose works because, soon enough, Red Rose has given up on the charitable acts and gone quite the other way. Soon it gets personal, it makes demands - unreasonable ones, it turns kind text messages from friends into nasty ones, and it posts inappropriate videos and comments to social media.

It doesn't stop there. It gets a lot worse. Weirder - and darker. The more the gang, and soon enough their parents too, learn about Red Rose the more dangerous it becomes. Red Rose, it seems, is not what anybody thought it was. Who is The Gardener? Who is Jacob (Charlie Hiscock)? And, not to put too fine a point on it, who is PIGFUCKER?

What are their intentions? What are their motivations? Why doesn't anyone just delete the fucking app? And why do a load of teenagers listen to music that came out about ten years before they were born? I noted tracks by Faithless, Ultra Nate, Robin S, N-Trance, Snap, Olive, Des'Ree, Tasmin Archer, and Oasis. Some even older. Laura Branigan, Boney M, 97 Lovers by Pulp, Boney M. Even Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. There must be some reason all these youngsters are listening to such old music!

The shellsuits worn by bullies Big Jenna (Hannah Griffiths) and Little Jenna (Silvie Furneaux), incidentally they're both about the same size, look dated too and I'm not totally convinced Aqua's Barbie Girl, even when delivered in a slowed down and hushed vocal style, really works as scary horror music but these are minor complaints because Red Rose is gripping from start to finish - and it's very difficult to predict what that finish will be.

Though there are nods to films and television programmes like Don't Look Now, The Vanishing, Frankenstein, The Ring, The Exorcist, Black Mirror, All Of Us Are Dead, and even Squid Game, Red Rose is resolutely its own thing. The psychological games of Guess Who the gang play ("do they look as if they own a cuckoo clock?", "do they think Covid is a hoax?") reflect the fact that often the gang are trying to second guess the intentions of even the people closest to them.

Red Rose refuses to only exist on the phones of Roch and Wren. It soon moves into dating apps, into the Internet of things, and into satnavs. The danger, of course, is will it move into the real world. I detect a sincerely felt dig at the social media entrepreneurs, especially Mark Zuckerberg, and even more I feel Red Rose delivers an important critique of the dark web and online cesspits like Reddit.

I was even, at one point, reminded of the horrific suicide epidemic of young people in Bridgend about fifteen years ago. Despite that, Red Rose does have its brighter moments. Roch's interactions with the twins, and Anthony's with Liam, are very sweet and how could anyone fail to snigger when presented with graffiti that reads "Ben drives a Micra and wears Crocs". The hills around Bolton look bloody lovely too.

With honourable mentions to Rod Hallett who plays Rachel's new love interest Simon and Amara Okereke as rich and popular party girl Becky Fox, the cast is outstanding throughout. They need to be because BBC3 don't have the budget of Netflix. This, however, can work in Red Rose's favour. Why can't the rain soaked streets of Bolton, or indeed the beautiful hills that surround it, be the setting for a dystopian and horrifying, yet thrilling, drama about what happens when we hand over too much of our lives to computers without really knowing how those computers work. Is the 'red rose' of the title the red rose of Lancashire or is it the red rose we lay on the grave of a loved one?