A superfit Wallander? It’s as daft as turning Poirot into a gunslinger
Kurt Wallander is the unhealthiest detective in fiction, a heart attack on legs. depressed and diabetic, he’s an alcoholic hooked on junk food and, more than once, his colleagues at Ystad police headquarters in Sweden have had to haul him, in a haze of vodka, out of his Volvo.
You’d never guess it from the way Sir Kenneth Branagh plays him in
Wallander (BBC1), though. He’s more like a decathlete in training for the police Olympics and never even breaking a sweat.
the inspector was attending a conference in Cape town and liked to start his day with a sprint up table Mountain. that was handy because, when urchins commandeered his hire car in a township, he was able to give chase to a motorbike assassin — on foot.
later, he shinned up a water tower and hid, before felling a villain by lobbing a spanner at him, like Fatima Whitbread loosing off a javelin.
Branagh wasn’t bad in the role, of course: he never is. But it’s a bizarre decision to make Wallander a fitness fanatic, when the original character is so different in the books. You might as well reimagine Sherlock Holmes as a party animal, or Hercule Poirot as a gunslinger.
In the brilliant Swedish version, actor Krister Henriksson went to the other extreme, plaguing Wallander with every illness known to medical science . . . including, in the final episodes, the heartbreaking onset of dementia.
this will be the last time Branagh
CLASSIC SOAP OF THE WEEKEND:
From Eastenders To Hollywood (BBC4) paid tribute to director Antonia Bird, and opened with one of her Queen Vic episodes, a twohander from 1986 with Den and Angie Watts. Why doesn’t the Beeb repeat the entire 30-year series from the start on iPlayer? plays him, in three 90- minute episodes that each comprise a complete story. It’s a format that works better when the inspector is in Sweden, surrounded by colleagues who included, for the first couple of series, tom Hiddleston as the insubordinate Magnus Martinsson.
Hiddleston is heavily tipped to be the next James Bond, or Yames Burned as the Swedes would say. Branagh hasn’t been a Bond baddie yet, so perhaps they will meet again.
He couldn’t be more stereotypically villainous than the criminal mastermind unmasked by Wallander in Cape town — a former antiapartheid hero who was now so corrupt he kept peacocks in the grounds of his mansion. nothing says ‘posh crook’ like a peacock.
John Kani purred his lines with melodramatic menace: ‘as much as it has been a pleasure, Mr Wallander, I don’t expect we’ll be seeing each other again.’ Branagh made a big production of hunting for clues and tailing suspects, but there was no need: that dialogue and those peacocks were enough to secure a conviction.
reading the emotions of england football manager Sir alf ramsay was far more difficult, in World Cup 1966:
Alfie’s Boys (BBC2). defender George Cohen, one of the world-beating team 50 years ago, remembered: ‘You couldn’t tell if he was angry, happy, upset, emotional, miserable, whatever — he was just alf, stone-face.’
But he could strike fear into his players with just a twitch of an eyebrow. Surviving members of the squad, including Jimmy Greaves — still bitterly disappointed he wasn’t picked for the final — and Sir Geoff Hurst, who scored a hat-trick that day, spoke of ramsay with nervous reverence.
this thorough documentary told us nothing we didn’t know, but it did it with such affectionate nostalgia that an hour-and-ahalf flew by. Most of the commentary came from the footballers, now in their 70s, though the late Bobby Moore’s first wife tina contributed entertaining asides.
She revealed how her earnings as a model, when they met in the early Sixties, outstripped the £8 a week her husband was paid. ‘I was the breadwinner,’ she said.
actress Sue Johnston supplied the fan’s view, admitting that during the World Cup she used to sneak into the swanky hotel where the foreign teams were staying, ‘in the hope of copping off with a player’.
the whole thing was narrated by Sir david Jason from a leather armchair, nattering away like Grandad on Only Fools and Horses. What marred it slightly was the over- enthusiastic soundtrack, blasting out everything from Matt Monro (On days like these) to Simon & Garfunkel (Bookends).
all you could do was sing along. Well, we always sing when we’re winning.