Woollander

Sir Kenneth Branagh just called – he wants his show back

With Henry away in Slovakia shooting something (not someone, we hope and trust), Alestair and I treated ourselves to the new police drama Shetland, produced by ITV Studios for BBC Scotland.  We were briefly interrupted by a telephone call from my great-uncle Haldenstøvare up in Lerwick, who was watching the same programme, and who complained for six or seven critical minutes about the characters all looking and sounding like Italians from Glasgow – except, of course, for the impeccably Nordic-looking leading man, who is named DI Perez (Douglas Henshall).

Taking the long view, I calmed old Hally down by suggesting that Perez might be the grandson of a Northern Italian POW who had been held in the Northern Isles during the war, and who was named ‘Perez’, rather than something Italian, as a result of the Spanish Empire having ruled the city of Milan from 1535 to 1706.  He harrumphed a bit but rang off.  (‘Result!’ as Alastair put it.)

Whether the average viewer will come up with this Milan theory on her own remains to be seen, however.

Putting aside all questions of inappropriate accent and dialect, which I am assured are legion, this is a beautifully made example of the new subgenre which (with ITV’s steadily improving Broadchurch: see Songs of Ignorance for 5 March) I have decided to call ‘Wallander Envy’.  Shetland’s scenery, its clothes, and even the typeface used for its titles are beautiful and work beautifully together; the mystery is neither overly simple nor overly complicated; and, as inexperienced PC Wilson, Being Human’s bloodthirsty Whitehall posh boy Steven Robertson further extends his considerable range.

Alistair also asked me to mention that DC MacIntosh (Allison O’Donnell) was ‘plump and pleasing’ and to ask if she could send us her telephone number, which I certainly will not do. He disputed whether Sophie (Sophie Rundle) could really be an Aberdeen University student, however: he’s taken about half of them home for one purpose or another, and we can both dismiss out of hand the idea that any of these delightful young ladies would verbally assault a policewoman on first meeting her, over the natural structure of her teeth, in an otherwise non-confrontational situation.

'Just look at those gnashers!'

The same student’s research supervisor is also cartoonishly sinister and sleazy in a ‘we-hate-the-English’ sort of way, so as an advertisement for the King’s College Aberdeen Archaeology Department the show gets only one star out of five.

Be that as it may, there are several more significant problems.  The ‘ticking clock’ element of the series is the upcoming Up Helly Aa festival.  Now, I may not be a great genius of meteorology, but Up Helly Aa takes place in mid-winter every year '…on the same latitude as southern Greenland'; so if it were imminent, as everyone and their brother in Shetland keeps saying, one would expect to see some rain, frost, hail, sleet, winter (as opposed to autumn/spring) coats, gloves, and hats, and most importantly, steaming breath being whipped away by, at least, a strong head wind, or at worst, a gale.  But instead, everything whatsoever that we see is typical of the period April-June, at least here in Aberdeenshire, 250 miles farther south.

Perhaps the Shetlands in January are a tropical paradise.  Certainly, they are meant to be Celtic: or at least the soundtrack people blatantly think so, never mind that if the islands’ original Pictish inhabitants were Celts (and debate about this has raged for hundreds of years), they were wiped out by the Norse more than a thousand years ago.

Whatever and wherever the show's islands are meant to be, DI Perez turns from an avuncular slowpoke into a screeching he-Valkyrie whenever anyone connected with his case catches, or threatens to catch, the ferry to Aberdeen.  This is off-putting in itself; but the last time I checked with dear Sylvie, the best methods of cheating British justice did not involve fleeing to the British mainland.

Who or what is Aberdeen?

We immediately watched the second and final episode.  While underwhelmed by the climactic confrontation scene, which relied far too heavily on the purely visual drama of Up Helly Aa b-roll, we could have gladly stared at this programme for another hour even if it had no dialogue or plot at all.

One final note: if you are a space alien studying our culture via the media, you could be forgiven for thinking that one out of every two human beings is either a troubled Detective Inspector or a put-upon Detective Sergeant.  I can assure you that both conditions remain, in actuality, mercifully rare.