The Herald - The Herald Magazine
SCREEN SHOT
What’s the story?
Man In Room 301.
Tell me more.
Lovers of Nordic noir stand by. A dark and brooding six-part Finnish psychological thriller is coming to BBC Four and BBC iPlayer.
Man In Room 301 centres on the Kurtti family whose lives are torn apart by the death of their toddler son. In 2007, while holidaying at a cabin in
Finland, their two-year-old Tommi wanders off and is shot dead. A 12-year-old boy called Elias Leppo is blamed for the killing.
Then what?
The story picks up 12 years later. On a holiday to Greece, the family becomes unsettled by a fellow guest at their resort. A man called Leo, staying in room 301, bears a resemblance to Leppo, fits the age profile, and seems to be acting suspiciously.
The family become convinced that they’ve found Tommi’s murderer. But what if they’re wrong?
Buckle up for a gripping tale of guilt, revenge, justice and forgiveness.
Anything else?
The idea for Man In Room 301 was conceived by actor and writer Kate Ashfield who co-wrote the chilling drama Born To Kill, which aired on Channel 4 in 2017, about a 16-year-old schoolboy who harbours psychopathic tendencies.
When can I watch?
Man In Room 301 airs weekly on BBC Four, Saturdays, 9pm, with all six episodes available to stream on BBC iPlayer from this weekend.
BORN as I was in the early 1960s, I’m the demographic for Boom Radio (boomradiouk. com) which launched on Valentine’s Day. There are 14 million of us possibly coming to an end of our mortgages/childrearing years and presumably with some spare money in our pockets which might attract passing advertisers.
Which might explain why Boom’s presenters – veterans, mostly men – from time to time, extol the virtues of small businesses between Alison Moyet and The Bachelors.
The station’s constant Boomer boosterism is a bit tiresome and clashes with the mental health messages. There’s something weird about hearing Diddy David Hamilton doing the same shtick he did in the 1970s.
What I do like about it, is its music policy. It’s not the place to hear The Fall or dubstep, but the way it jumbles together music from the 1950s to the 2000s means there’s a genuine sense of the unexpected. If you want to hear Nat King Cole segue into The Weather Girls, this is the station for you.
In other news Radio 5 Live has been doing my head in. Tuesday morning’s breakfast show, in the wake of Boris Johnson’s roadmap out of lockdown, was giddy with the prospect of an easing of restrictions. And that was just the presenters. 5 Live has offered some of the best pandemic coverage over the last year, but at times it seems inclined to see the pandemic as an inconvenience rather than a health crisis. And, if I hear Tony Livesey say, “let’s look for the positive” one more time … it’s a pandemic, for goodness sake. Maybe there isn’t an upside.
Or maybe I need a holiday, like everyone else.
Listen Out For: For the Love of Leo, Radio 4, Friday, 11.30am. Mark Bonnar returns for a third series