Duel in Shetland’s crown
WATCHING an episode of the Eighties cop show Bergerac recently, I realised the difficulties of outdoor filming. You want your TV series to have an attractive backdrop. The more attractive your backdrop is, though, the more people will be there, enjoying it. You’re forced to film out of season and then your paradise location looks no more alluring than Altrincham on a winter Wednesday.
At least SHETLAND (BBC1) doesn’t have to pretend. The wildness and the weather are the essence of the place and if the pop festival in last night’s episode looked about as popular and festive as a wet funeral, it set the tone for the story. The beauty of the Jimmy Perez novels by Ann Cleeves, and these BBC adaptations, too, is the way a unique world is stripped bare.
The Shetland Isles, beat of the tough-but-fair DI Perez (Douglas Henshall) are part of Britain. The people like takeaway curries and East Enders, as they do everywhere else. Yet the place is special, too.
Old slights and grudges linger in small communities, as last night’s story reminded us. Thomas Malone, (Stephen Walters) convicted in 1994 for the murder of local girl Lizzie Kilmuir, was let out on appeal and returned to his home on Unst.
Where such a man could vanish in a city, in the islands Malone’s return was an event more significant than any windy pop festival. It was especially significant to Drew McColl (Sean McGinley), the now-retired policeman who’d secured Malone’s confession.
Within 24 hours, McColl’s only daughter Sally (Amy Lennox) was dead, in circumstances eerily matching the old Kilmuir case. Things weren’t as they seemed, though. Sally, a journalist, had been researching a story that threatened an offshore drilling company.
Alan (Gerard Miller), her controlling boyfriend, lied about his whereabouts on the night she vanished. Then there were question marks over McColl and how he got Malone’s confession 24 years ago.
You sense a touch of the Wild West about these stories, Perez the Sheriff trying to bring justice to a place with its own rules.
This was never more marked than last night, as a mob attacked Malone’s house and dragged him to a pit, intent on burying him.
Savage, frightening and thoroughly watchable. I’m just not sure Visit Shetland would approve.
At the start of FLATPACK EMPIRE (BBC2) they told us that Ikea is Sweden’s number one export. I was delighted, having suspected for some time that the country’s chief gift to the world might be moody TV detectives with complicated private lives. I’d also thought, having spent quite a bit of it in Ikea, that someone should make a programme about it.
It’s such a strange phenomenon, this yellow-and-blue world inside a tin box, where a bed is a Flekke and a packet of marshmallows is a Sotsak Skumtopp, and you can spend an entire day buying them (along with cushion covers, cutlery drawers and a bathroom) and finish with a hotdog.
Rather than capturing the magic of Ikea (or the hell of it), this BBC treatment invents dramas out of the undramatic. Will the bookcase units pass the stringent water tests? Will the new Sheffield store open in time? Who cares?
The subject needs a less plodding look, a Jonathan Meades or a Sue Perkins to wander round, fascinated and appalled, while picking up bargain tea lights.