Location, location....scenery! Putting TV thrillers in their place

I have neglected the Thrillfilter site over the past few months, which is not to say I’ve abandoned the crime and espionage genres. I have been guilty of obsessive Kindling, unable to resist the attractions of cheaper-than-the-hardback serials. Not to mention total immersion TV.

Netflix, of course, gave us the second season of House of Cards, which was terrific, but my big (re)discovery in telly terms has been the writing of the late Alan Plater. I bought the 20th anniversary DVD box set of The Beiderbecke Trilogy off eBay, which remains absolutely superb. Two teachers (woodwork and English) do not solve crimes, but explore the world of Thatcherite repression with heartbreaking wit and warmth. It sent me in the direction of Plater’s jazz autobiography (the unfortunately named Doggin' Around) and the recorded works of Bix Beiderbecke and Sidney Bechet.

Plater’s book of Oliver’s Travels  is far better than the TV series (Beiderbecke hits the road), in which a terribly miscast Alan Bates flounders floridly in a part written for Tom Courtenay. Bill Patterson is great, though. And so is Orkney. Then there’s Plater’s screenwriting for the Olivia Manning series of World War Two books Fortunes of War, starring the young Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.  This wonderful tale of  eccentric British Council teachers and stragglers caught up in World War Two retains all its style, wit and power. And the acting is brilliant throughout. Available very cheaply on DVD.

There has been a huge upsurge of crime-related, location-defined TV drama recently. For the sake of peacekeeping I’ll not say anything much about Shetland, the adaptations of Anne Cleeves’ crime novels. Other than this: It’s getting better, and will improve further once the next series abandons the book plots. I live in those locations, though, and so have to overcome what our family calls ‘Green and Orange Bus Syndrome’, after a comment my wife made to one of the executives responsible for Taggart, thus cutting short my brief STV career (“The only reason people watch this rubbish is for the green and orange buses”). Hinterland is very much a Welsh Broadchurch-meets-Taggart and very well shot. I abandoned ship though, halfway through the second episode.  It creaks, if stylishly. No buses, but a dodgy caravan in a ridiculous setting, and loads of Welsh landscape. The Broadchurch II plot/backstory is pushing it, though.

Then there’s Fargo. I was puzzled, initially, by the whole concept of adapting the tone and location of the great Coen Brothers movie, while using aspects of the main film characters to ‘inspire’ what are essentially new ones. Yet it works well.  Martin Freeman at last transfers that weird cock-of-the-head mannerism into something utterly  un-Office, anti-Hobbit. Billy Bob Thornton is magnificently charming, funny and brutally sinister, and the infusion of David Lynchian Blue Velvet surrealism is an effortless fit with the cold humour of the Coens.

There’s nothing cold about Happy Valley. I have avoided the Sally Wainwright ouevre for no reason other than laziness and suspicions over someone working in what appeared to be Plater territory. But the first episode of Happy Valley completely captivated me. The Fargo references are overt and knowing, but the central female cop character, played by the amazing Sarah Lancashire, goes from initially funny through pathos to a kind of threatening, vengeful, simmering rage, all in the first 50 minutes. It has a rare narrative momentum (the polar opposite of Hinterland, for example) and the attention to detail is what raises it head and shoulders, I think, above the other ‘thrillers’ I’ve mentioned. Including Fargo, the (movie) plot of which is knowingly referenced. The grandchild’s behavioural problems, the affair with the ex-husband, the weird Corrie-in-the-country vibe of Hebden Bridge, nastified for the occasion; those sly, breathtaking wee scenes like the BMW Estate with mountain bike rack, and the appearance of Sylvia Plath’s actual grave at one point. I absolutely loved it.

And of course, the influence of Alan Plater is everywhere. The magnificent George Costigan (from The Beiderbecke Tapes) as Nevison may even be a nod in that direction. It’s more brutal and may turn bloodier than Plater could ever be, but it has wit, style and, most importantly, warmth. This is flesh and blood drama, anchored in more than just a location, more than scenery, but in a sense of real, beating human hearts.

One thing, and this applies to all current police dramas: We know cops have to wear disposable rubber gloves and weird wee bootees at a crime scene. But please, stop dwelling on it as if it’s an absolute indicator of verisimilitude and accuracy.

My sacrifice: I read this so you don't have to

I thought I should read this because it is to be filmed, and we Shetlanders are endlessly fascinated by portrayals of our archipelago. Some of us - though not me - because, of course, every writer makes errors, whether in language or geography, and some of us - not me - cannot bear it, fascinated and indignant concerning bloopers.

Me, I like  ingenious plotting, great characters, and splendid writing. For contrast, take the recent dramatisation of Shetland, from Ann Cleeves, and STV's Broadchurch. The former had terrible plotting, hopeless characters, and dismal writing. It also did a complex round of the islands, regularly and inconsistently, to get from the north end of Bressay to the ferry. Which would not have mattered at all. If not for the aforementioned plotting, characters, writing etc.

Broadchurch was not adapted from a novel, had one principal writer, and gripped from beginning to end. It was great, with excellent actors as well. 

So. You will note that I have got this far in without really making much of SJ Bolton's Sacrifice at all. So 
no sacrifices by me so far.  But it won't do. It is truly terrible. A small but telling detail. What, for God's sake is a "soft, sweet, eastcoast accent"? One such is possessed by a WPC, where it proves that she doesn't come 
from Shetland? Peterhead? Peterheid?

Anyway. Women are dug from the peat. They might be ancient, due to the  curative properties of the moor. But as it turns out, they aren't. It's all about a sort of Shetlandic sub-species of trow. Full sized, and very clever, and born out of women who get sacrificed (hence the title), and a massive conspiracy which manages to include pretty well the whole workforce at the local hospital, and so on.

I think that covers it, though I was speedreading towards the end. Well, after, say, page 23. 

I have read it (well,sort of) so you don't have to. And because I can't really be bothered with 
the supernatural, I probably won't trouble with the movie. Or definitely.

Drew Ratter

God help me, I watched the second episode

From comments around Shetland today on last night's episode, and on the Twittersphere, I'd say percentage-wise it's 80-20 dumbstruck at the sheer awfulness of Shetland. The 20 per cent loved it with a great and surpassingly sentimental landscapery love.

Tonight I was in the end reduced to giggles. Not at the appalling editing of the Up Helly A' sequence (day, then it's night, then it's day, a few vikings, a lot of vikings, setting fire to the boat, not setting fire to the boat, then into Promote Shetland's excellent footage of the actual winter festival. Which is vast, crazy, rather wonderful, and frankly makes what was on telly look rather silly.

No, it was the predictable bathos of the plot, and the hyper-oxygenated (in one case, via a cylinder) acting of the principals.  With the exception of the great Stephen Robertson, who was barely in it tonight. Rather too good, I fear. Don't forget he actually played Jimmy Perez, in the Radio Four adaptation of Ann Cleeves's White Nights.

I will leave you with an invitation to view tomorrow's Scottish Sun, which is devoting Page 8 to the show, and indeed to my thoughts on it. And the following quotes:

"As far as I'm concerned, this is a suspicious death."

"Just got the pathologist's report. You were right. Foul play!"

"They say, on a clear day you can see Norway...and Iceland."

But not Denmark. Where Sarah Lund sits, slowly shaking her head...her jumper's status is safe.

Most watched TV programme at 9.00pm on Sunday with 6.4 million viewers, mind you. Probably a lot less tonight. But I fear, I truly fear, they may commission a series.

Dalry's Volunteer and Masonic Arms, and the ferry from Largs to Millport, better start preparing for the tellytourists.

'Shetland' - bloody revenge of the enraged cellphone user

The truth is, Mima (or Mina, or Meena or whoever the hell one of the only two real Shetlanders with speaking roles was playing) was killed by an enraged TV scriptwriter who, during his four hour research trip to Hjaltland and environs, couldn't get 4G, 3G or any damn G at all (save that gee-gee 3 used in their advert) to update Facebook, check his emails and Tweet about how far north he was.

So now you know.

Actually, that isn't true, just in case you were wondering. Myrna (or Marnie or Morna) was actually shot by a furious representative of the Danish national TV corporation, severely pissed off at an attempt to make a murder mystery where it is always so bloody dark, even in summer, even at midday,  my Tesco telly wouldn't show anything but weird shadows of a woman in a horned (horned?) viking helmet.

I'm lying. Not about the horns.

She was killed by members of Shetland ForWirds, the dialect campigning group, berserk with anger at the gallimaufry (Celtic, not Norse word) of accents paraded here. Northern Irish? Surely they're not going to pretend that's a Bressay lilt? No "She came here on holiday". After seeing this, it's doubtful if anyone else will, not unless they're keen on digging up skulls in surpassingly dreich weather. In Ayrshire, where most of 'Shetland' was actually filmed. Sorry, and Renfrewshire.

False.

I have not read Red Bones, the Ann Cleeves novel 'Shetland' is based on. I have tried, but I find Cleeves' style of detective fiction, which is sort of Agatha Christie meets Patricia Cornwell, round at Colin Dexter's house, pretty alienating. I have struggled through the first Jimmy Perez book, Raven Black, and it looks like chunks of that have been lifted and chucked into the tellymix too. Because Up Helly A' is irresistible to tellyvolk, even if you do film in summer and then pretend everything goes pitch dark when the street lights go off...even though it's dark at noon, and...oh never mind. I was expecting David Kane's script to strip off a lot of the angsty wallpaper,  all the Inner Wondering About Dark Secrets Of The Past. But no. They were there, just jerkily presented in a form of televisual shorthand.  A form few, if any could make head nor tail of.

The characters were confusing. The accents were generally odd, with the exception of Sandra Voe and Stephen Robertson, who is such an outstanding actor (superb in He Kills Coppers, Red Riding and a lot more) and so obviously A Real Shetlander, that he threatened to tip the action heavily towards himself whenever he opened his mouth. Dougie Henshall, who can be very good, seems to have decided that drunken slurring is the way to a Shetland accent. He's been mixing with the wrong crowd.

I know most people won't care about the ludicrous abuse of Shetland's geography, or about the way a genuine piece of history (the Shetland Bus operation) has been traduced in the story. I know quite a lot about what happened in Shetland during World War Two. Some of it was terrible. Some of it was worse than that. There was unbelievable heroism and great tragedy. To see it reduced to a chessboard TV murder plotline is actually a bit upsetting.

'Shetland' and Red Bones both use a place, a people and a history as local colour for a sub-Taggartian, linear-with-flashbacks whodunnit. The TV treatment is dull, unimaginative, creaky and is a throwback in writing and direction to pre-digital drama. It's Softly Softly, not the Shadow Line. And most obviously not ITV's vastly superior Broadchurch, with which it goes head-to-head on Monday.

There has been a great deal of bigging-up of 'Shetland' in Shetland, not to mention tremendous enthusiasm and some of the islands' promotional tourist cash ploughed into the production. The end result felt like a betrayal.

And in fact, I know who killed Meernamornamynamoira: It was one of those native Shetlandic bagpipers. you know, the ones at the traditional Shetland 'kaylee'...in Dalry.