Here we go again, then: another murky Scandinavian thriller that will be watched by not very many people (though probably a lot for a foreign import on BBC4) but that will generate an enormous amount of coverage in certain corners of the media. This corner, in fact. Because we are those people. Come on then, let's dive into the gloom and get involved with The Bridge (Saturday, BBC4).
The Bridge of the title is the big one that connects Denmark and Sweden, the Oresund bridge; this is a collaboration between the two countries. That's going to be tricky for those of us whose understanding of Danish is pretty much perfect after 40 hours of The Killing and Borgen, to have another confusingly similar language mixed in. May have to look at the subtitles for these first two episodes.
Anyway, after the lights go out on the bridge, the body of a woman is found, half in one country, half in the other, neatly. And it turns out she's half Danish, half Swedish – literally, because she's not one woman at all. It's the top half of somebody and the bottom half of somebody else (and, eurgh, we've got some horrible cross-sections to witness). Well, the chief suspect has to be a magician, doesn't it? Not a very good one either – his attempts to master the saw-a-lady-in-half trick keep going wrong. He's got so many tops and bottoms, he's got a bit muddled with his dumping. Paul Danielsson, that's where I'd start.
But I'm not leading the investigation, which is probably a good thing. Actually, it's not entirely clear who is. For the Danes there's Martin Rohde, a shambles of a man who's just had a vasectomy in an attempt to stem his prodigious procreating. And on the Malmö side of the bridge there's Saga Noren, a Porsche-driving ice queen, so devoid of empathy or any kind of social skills you have to suspect she's on the spectrum. She, unlike Sarah Lund, is hard to love; but I'm growing to respect her, as Rohde does too. She's certainly the star, and an intriguing character: weird, unfeeling, cruel (though not intentionally so); also vulnerable and sometimes comic.
There are other interesting characters, most notably an immoral newspaper columnist who ends up locked in his car with a ticking time-bomb: "I've slagged so many people off," he whimpers, when Noren asks him, cool as you like over the phone, who might have done this to him. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to everyone I've been less than generous to in print and to reassure them that it's all been done in the best possible spirit.
Anyway, the bomb doesn't go off. It's a hoax this time. And our hack escapes, for now. Turns out I was wrong about the magician too. There's a serial killer on the loose, preying on the vulnerable, driven by sick politics and some kind of warped sense of morality. All of which gets an extra kick of poignancy, given the real-life trial of Anders Behring Breivik going on not far away.
I don't know yet if The Bridge is as good as the first series of The Killing. What I'm not getting, along with its bleakness, is the humanness The Killing had. Not just because there doesn't appear to be anyone likable in The Bridge, but also I'm not feeling any sense of terrible personal tragedy and loss in these murders. Perhaps that will come. Or maybe that's all in keeping with its spirit of cold, and the lack of normal human feeling in the principal character. It's Nordic Super-Noir.
Certainly it's gripping – involving, haunting, beautiful – in an unfriendly way of course (God, does the sun NEVER come out over there?). It creeps up and wraps itself around you – not cosily, like a blanket, more like the mist coming in off the Baltic. Brrrrr.
Six hundred miles or so away across the North Sea, another lady detective is trying to get to the bottom of an attempted murder. The timing of Vera (ITV1, Sunday) is unfortunate, because in spite of a fine performance by Brenda Blethyn in the title role, it feels slight after The Bridge. Even the green fields and dry-stone walls of the Northumberland countryside looks twee and parochial after those industrial landscapes and dark Nordic skies.
It's a bit formulaic too: she's got her troubled past, tick; and her good humoured side-kick, tick; and there are the red herrings, and a twist in the end, tick, tick, tick … No, I'm not being wrapped in anything here. Perhaps it's a just a bit British.
