An eye-popping insight into the Pyongyang gang
This is a family business. As long as you’re not a chronic alcoholic and you can sit up straight in your chair, and you’re not mentally retarded, you’re going to get a job.” No, not the Trump organisation, but the family with a similar nepotistic credo which sits at the top of the tree in Pyongyang.
So said political analyst Michael Madden in North Korea: Murder in the Family (Sunday, BBC Two), an eyepopping insight into the dynasty whose beaming public face is podgy Armageddon fantasist Kim Jong-un.
The North Korean leader isn’t always willing to give his family an easy ride; he is said to have ordered the murder of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur airport this year.
With its unvarnished CCTV footage and expert analysis from spooks and wonks, this was a riveting forensic account of that audacious hit executed by two apparently clueless showgirls, with a contextualising life story of the unfortunate Kim Jong-nam thrown in.
On fun nights out, the flabby playboy liked to book prostitutes for his chums and watch. “So there was a degree of voyeurism,” said an expert commentator. Only a degree?
A friend from Kim Jong-nam’s Swiss school days thought he wasn’t cut out for high office. “It’s a certain skillset you need and he’s a nice boy.” In short, he didn’t like killing, though he was required to witness executions when he came home from school.
The derangement of dictators is always good box office, but there were also fascinating insights into North Korea’s foreign business activities, all illegal and a formidable disincentive for the likes of Malaysia to enforce true sanctions against Pyongyang.
Kim Jong-nam was the product of Kim Jong-il’s affair with an actress. It wasn’t made clear if he and Kim Jong-un ever met, and there was scant information on his offspring. But in a striking coup, the film ended with a vlog of Kim Jong-nam’s oldest son speaking to camera. “We hope this gets better soon,” he said in perfect English. The lad might want to watch his back in airports.
One gripe: the word “nuclear” came up a lot, for obvious reasons. and every time the uncredited voiceover artist pronounced it “nucular”, thus bolstering my theory that the BBC Pronunciation Unit is a mythical chimera.
We think of Scandinavia as a placid region of consensual tax-enabled hygge. But the Nordic noir dramas they export paint a picture of government conspiracy, police psychosis and criminal megalomania. If The Killing and The Bridge are to be credited, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, not to mention Sweden.
Valkyrien (Sunday, Channel 4) is from Norway. While it’s not written by him, anyone who devours the fiction of Jo Nesbo will recognise this Norwegian strain of crazy plotting, starting with the comical opening to the first episode.
A gang of burglars were emptying a bank when, with the police on their way, one of their number accidentally locked his pals inside. He took a bullet in his kidney by way of punishment and somehow fetched up being operated on in the illicit underground lab of an off-grid surgeon.
The doctor is called Ravn (Sven Nordin). He hung up his white coat after his wife Wilma (Pia Halvorsen) was denied the experimental treatment they had both been developing but had yet to test on humans. By the end of the episode we learnt why Ravn was happy to be abducted from Wilma’s funeral, and why there was no body in her coffin.
In short, bonkers. To get the full benefit of Valkyrien it’s probably safest to switch your incredulity reflex off at the mains and consent to be pelted by some of Nordic noir’s more highfalutin’ absurdities. The conduit for most of them is Leif (Pål Sverre Hagen), a spectral fixer and one of those paranoid Scandis who blogs that the apocalypse is just round the next bend (though who, having read the headlines, can blame him?).
There are eight episodes to get through. Aficionados will know how these things play out: hyperactively, with a lot of straight faces and blind alleys. The show’s creator is Erik Richter Strand.
It’s reported that a British version is in the pipeline with Mark Strong, and while I would never normally recommend avoiding the subtitled original, it might be worth hanging on to see if it seems any more sane and rational in English.
North Korea: Murder in the Family