The greater part of Sunday involved an enjoyable lunch, some rose Turkish delight, the brilliant new detective series with Kenneth Branagh, Wallander and a not so brilliant series called Survivor.
The meal comprised a vegetable soup, and a stuffed shoulder of lamb with roast potatoes and garden peas. A full glass of red wine In the evening I had a tomato and cucumber salad and a tin of rice pudding. There was Scottish porridge and toast in the morning. Turkish delight the mince pie in the afternoon.
Kurt Wallander is a fictional Swedish police Inspector following in the footsteps of the George Simenon’s Maigret and the Dutch TV series Van de Valk and with more than a trace of the British detective Morse. Born 1948 makes him early forties when the first novel was completed and early fifties when the last novel was written. There is a further novel in which his daughter is the main character Before the Frost and which I watched on BBC Player on Monday morning, in Swedish with sub titles. Between 1994 and 2007 the nine novels were created into a TV series for Swedish TV and in addition 13 original stories were created 2005 2006 to make 22 episodes. A further 13 episodes were created during 2008 at the same time as the BBC commenced first productions The BBC series is only three 90 minutes films with the first two shown last Sunday and yesterday.
I begin with a confession because although I have been an avid fan of the police/detective/crime film and for a short time belonged to a crime book club with not one but three Ed McBain books I was unaware of the popularity of the character and its author Henning Mankell, that he has sold 25 million books in forty countries or is it languages and that in Germany he outsells Harry Potter. However I am familiar with the work of Kenneth Charles Branagh who has become one of the most outstanding actors of stage, film and TV of the past three decades and also a director.
I believe I have seen him act in Shakespeare in New Castle but I will need to check my programmes to be sure. I have seen his film productions of the work of Shakespeare Henry V, Much ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Love Labour’s Lost and As you like it. I also especially enjoyed the TV series Fortunes of War in which he starred along with his then wife Emma Thompson. He has also appeared in, A month in the Country, Look back in Anger remake, Conspiracy. Peter’s Friends. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Gingerbread Man, and the Goebbels’s Experiment which I also remember experiencing. Of Northern Irish background he speaks Italian and was married for six years to Emma Thompson, and had a well publicised relationship with Helena Bonham Carter and is now married to the art director Lindsay Brunnock since 2003
It has to be remembered that the author is Swedish and I have previously written of my brief two week visit to Sweden and the work of Ingmar Bergman providing an indication of the Nordic soul reflecting the sense of space in the countryside, the openness and liberalism of the people matched with spiritual Puritanism. In the books and Swedish series Wallander listens to opera in his car which has been dropped because of the similarity with John Thaw as Morse. However he is also cultured and shows similar insight and empathy for the victims and their families and his work has come to dominate his life, especially since separation and divorce although he maintain contact with his adult daughter and has an uneasy relationship with his father, a man who paints the same landscape over and over again, played by another fine actor David Warner. The books are set in the southern coastal town of Ystad which according to the available documentary has a quaint clean living crime free feel and where now the places used by the detective have all been renamed to fit the books and have become an international tourist attraction, as here in South Shields we have the Cookson Trail showing the places covered in the books of Catherine Cookson.
The first film watched on the BBC I player, and missed last week because of tiredness concerns a top level sex ring involving prostitutes and teenage virgins brought in from all over the world., The organiser is a senior policeman from the vice squad who when his home is raided is found to have half a dozen women imprisoned in his cellar. During the middle to late 1990’s I was contacted my a mysterious woman representing an organisation concerned with young adults who claimed to have been abused with the care system, and she alleged the existence of such a ring here in the North East, involving senior figures in the public care system and with some police involvement as well as other prominent figures in the community and where those concerned went through the motions of satanic rituals, used children and animals. It is the kind of claim that has been made in other parts of the UK during the past half century and back in Victorian times and before.
In the documentary accompanying the series a number of well-spoken English citizens of Stockholm buying copies of the books at a personal signing session explained that unlike Miss Marple who was a one dimension obvious literary creation, Wallander was a man dedicated to his work with normal human failings and interests, but who maintained a mission against the dark side of Swedish life which he felt was overcoming his country while retaining a belief that if those of good will and with standards worked together things could turn for the better. Early on in this first film Kenneth Branagh tried to help a terrified 15 year old in a field of beautiful yellow flowering rape who when he calls out to her not to be afraid because he is a policeman she pours petrol over herself and sets it on fire. He remains haunted by the death and what he sees as his failure although he was not to know that for this girl who has previously placed her trust in a policeman, he had not only betrayed that trust but led her into horrific sexual violence.
There is an important difference between the portrayal of the Character by Branagh as a much more feeling and emotional expressive individual closer to Morse and Maigret than the characterisation in the Swedish TV series in the episode which I have now experienced. The actor is at one level outwardly restrained although just as explosive when it comes to his won family issues or when faced with the evil human beings can do, sometimes believing they are doing so for good reasons. A feature of all three films is that there are no red herrings, false trails and you are provided with clues, links and connections and where the main story and its outcome, as with Morse, Maigret and Van de Valk are secondary to the exploration of the main character and his relationships with colleagues and with family.
The episode in Swedish is important because it explains what Wallander has become because of his work. He is able to explain this to his graduate daughter who has not just joined the police but successfully applied to join his station after graduation, a graduation which he fails to attend by one day, getting the days mixed up, humiliating his daughter who has taken the step in order to have the relationship with her father she missed during her childhood. He explains that the work became his identity and through the work he felt alive and with purpose but the price was to lose his wife and as be believed a daughter. He had then become destroyed as a social human being without a private life. Eating and drinking too well and usually alone, their relationship and these issues are an intrinsic component of the episode plot. A flock of swans are set on fire, and we learn subsequently filmed. A medical doctor who undertakes abortions is hung in a church. The daughter decided that she does not want to stay with her father and crashes at the home of one of her university/high school friends and who then has a picnic with others friends including one who has a child through artificial insemination and where the friend with whom she is crashes reacts with great hostility because of the unnaturalness of the birth. Later the child is abducted and the attempt made to drown the child according to one biblical passage before taking a van filled with explosives to try and blow up a gay wedding held in a church. The father of the friend disappeared 25 years ago and the daughter admits she has missed him everyday. It is only gradually we learn that he was involved on the Jones town mass suicide of 918 people through poisoning in Guyana in 1978, an internationally assembled agricultural commune, although primarily the individuals came from California and formed the largest collective deaths of North Americans outside of natural causes until 9/11. The father has returned to new fundamentalist religious cult and we learn is the father of his daughters pregnancy. There is a natural justice ending and Wallander and his daughter commenced the relationship they never were able to have previously. It was only when my mother became dependent and child like at the age of 97 that I had the relationship with her never experienced as a child and which was healing for me and helped her to overcome the fear that developed during the period when she obtained some awareness of her past.
I want to begin with the third in the series and the second film watched to date because of the topicality of the main story line, an attempt by fanatics to bring the Swedish financial system crashing by distributing malicious codes wiping out data for political reason rather than theft or blackmail, The sub plot is that his daughter persuades Kenneth who had a depressive streak to stop his existence of work, work and living on his own and to try a dating agency. Unfortunately the attractive divorce is not what she seems and is connected to main story. My only reservation which may reflect how senior police officer‘s operate in Sweden is that too often he makes visits, sometimes dangerous visits on his own. However with the help of teenage whiz kid hacker the financial world is saved and the cause of a series of murders unravelled.
Then at nine on Sunday I experienced the second of the three films in this first series and where the main plot is significantly topical. As with the recent episode of Spooks it involves a plot to destroy the financial system of a country. In this instance by the comprehensive distribution of malicious codes throughout the financial system destroy the data held in those system. Imagine all our.
The related sub plot is that the daughter persuades Kenneth to try and get a life after his former wife announces she wants a divorce to remarry and to try a dating agency and the attractive divorcee is not what she seems and is connected to main story. This was too good an coincidence for my liking. My other reservation which may reflect how senior police officer‘s operate in Sweden is that too often he makes visits, sometimes dangerous visits on his own. However with the help of teenage whiz kid hacker the financial world is saved and the cause of a series of murders unravelled.
I suspect that the original Wallander is too Nordic and Germanic for my Mediterranean soul, something which Italian speaking Branagh is remedying. I am not inclined to go out an but a translated edition of one of his novel. But I am tempted to go back to rewrite my own effort of 1992 and 1993.
So far there is nothing original in the first two episodes of Survivors on BBC1 I watched the first 90 minute episode on BBC i player by mistake but stayed to see what if it offered anything original. At present it appears that over 99% of the population has been wiped out by a virus plaque. There is the suggestion that this was not an accident but only a few second hint so far so it does not merit speculation.
As what happens in such a situation, the subject of countless TV series and films, after coping with the horror of seeing all their families, work colleagues and friends die begin the process of individual and collective survival. I have previously written of the War Time exercise at the national Civil Defence College, I once participated where the actions and decision of fellow local authority chief officers created 80000 more death than necessary but modest additional losses compared to the 235000 or so extra deaths of one previous group, This did not surprise me, or some of the individual decisions and attitudes which revealed what would have had happened had Fascism or Communism taken control on mainland UK. The most depressing aspects was the reconstruction committee held at the end divided between those who saw the opportunity to establish a dictatorship and those who wanted to revert back to the previous ways and approaches which had led to the nuclear devastations of our cities. No one, not one of those directly involved in Committee said stop, first we much be satisfied that the rule of law is established and that basic protection and freedoms are restored as quickly a possible with people fed and clothed. Then we need to sit down together and decide how we are going to ensure that what happened does not happen again. Of course this was said at the end of World War I and II but things have not yet changed for the better.
The second half of the first episode concerned how the main characters come together. A teenage Muslim is left alone alive at Prayers at the Mosque and leaves London for a Northern City to find out if any of his cousins survive. A city whiz kid find himself alone in his penthouse with his girlfriend for night dead alongside him in bed and hooks up with the Muslim and start to play football together in the middle of the M1. A mother says goodbye to her husband as he dies and goes off in search of her teenage son who is away on an outward bound adventure course, but he had an accident and had been taken to the local hospital where she finds everyone dead, but not her son. An African Caribbean Englishman wants to be alone but decides to follow the mother who declares that they need to work together to survive. A killer serving a life sentence is locked in his cells but is then released by a crazed warder sufficient to escape. A doctor loses faith and also heads off from her houseboat and they all meet up and decide to from a community.
And the government, well they are shown as inept and unprepared and die with everyone else except their public relations spokesperson who pretend and pretends misleads and misrepresents for good intentions and for bad until she is forced to admit that most of you are dead, help yourself, try and be good and God have mercy on all our souls, although why God should in such circumstances in something of a puzzle.
In the second episode the age of reality dawns on the group the hard way as they learn that he or she who holds the gun controls everything else except the soul and human spirit. Sub alliances are formed within the group and there is one nee arrival to make it three men, three young women and one boy and no oldies yet.
I then decided to watch the third episode which has three themes. A minor theme was the importance of creative people in a crisis. They need to protect the chickens. My mother kept chickens as did her father, and also rabbits. She would buy little chicks and raise them for eggs and for food. The rabbits were supposed to breed but did not, got more and more fat and eventually she sold them to the butcher and she could not bear to eat them. In this episode they try and build a chicken house and then the creative one ,the financial wizard works out that they need to do is find the nearest garden centre. One Abby, the mother who understands the problem finds the government centre with electricity and water and some supplies and the Government lady press spokesman in charge who has lost her two children and who has a plan the vision of varying out. However this motley small group has one fascist who wants to shoot everyone in sight, as the group has come under attack from those in search of food which is odd given what is still available elsewhere in the community . The woman leader cracks under the strain and shoots a trespasser in order to exert her authority over the rest of the group as much as the intruder, Abby beats a quick retreat go in search of fuel at local farms and come across one where young widower and his two daughters have not been in human contact because of minor food poisoning since the virus attack commenced and have now barricaded themselves in, to the growing horror of the eldest child a girl around twelve. This was the only credible and interesting part of the episode in which the relationship between father and his daughter, the two men between each other and the two men and the daughter is developed beyond the superficial.
The meal comprised a vegetable soup, and a stuffed shoulder of lamb with roast potatoes and garden peas. A full glass of red wine In the evening I had a tomato and cucumber salad and a tin of rice pudding. There was Scottish porridge and toast in the morning. Turkish delight the mince pie in the afternoon.
Kurt Wallander is a fictional Swedish police Inspector following in the footsteps of the George Simenon’s Maigret and the Dutch TV series Van de Valk and with more than a trace of the British detective Morse. Born 1948 makes him early forties when the first novel was completed and early fifties when the last novel was written. There is a further novel in which his daughter is the main character Before the Frost and which I watched on BBC Player on Monday morning, in Swedish with sub titles. Between 1994 and 2007 the nine novels were created into a TV series for Swedish TV and in addition 13 original stories were created 2005 2006 to make 22 episodes. A further 13 episodes were created during 2008 at the same time as the BBC commenced first productions The BBC series is only three 90 minutes films with the first two shown last Sunday and yesterday.
I begin with a confession because although I have been an avid fan of the police/detective/crime film and for a short time belonged to a crime book club with not one but three Ed McBain books I was unaware of the popularity of the character and its author Henning Mankell, that he has sold 25 million books in forty countries or is it languages and that in Germany he outsells Harry Potter. However I am familiar with the work of Kenneth Charles Branagh who has become one of the most outstanding actors of stage, film and TV of the past three decades and also a director.
I believe I have seen him act in Shakespeare in New Castle but I will need to check my programmes to be sure. I have seen his film productions of the work of Shakespeare Henry V, Much ado about Nothing, Hamlet, Love Labour’s Lost and As you like it. I also especially enjoyed the TV series Fortunes of War in which he starred along with his then wife Emma Thompson. He has also appeared in, A month in the Country, Look back in Anger remake, Conspiracy. Peter’s Friends. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Gingerbread Man, and the Goebbels’s Experiment which I also remember experiencing. Of Northern Irish background he speaks Italian and was married for six years to Emma Thompson, and had a well publicised relationship with Helena Bonham Carter and is now married to the art director Lindsay Brunnock since 2003
It has to be remembered that the author is Swedish and I have previously written of my brief two week visit to Sweden and the work of Ingmar Bergman providing an indication of the Nordic soul reflecting the sense of space in the countryside, the openness and liberalism of the people matched with spiritual Puritanism. In the books and Swedish series Wallander listens to opera in his car which has been dropped because of the similarity with John Thaw as Morse. However he is also cultured and shows similar insight and empathy for the victims and their families and his work has come to dominate his life, especially since separation and divorce although he maintain contact with his adult daughter and has an uneasy relationship with his father, a man who paints the same landscape over and over again, played by another fine actor David Warner. The books are set in the southern coastal town of Ystad which according to the available documentary has a quaint clean living crime free feel and where now the places used by the detective have all been renamed to fit the books and have become an international tourist attraction, as here in South Shields we have the Cookson Trail showing the places covered in the books of Catherine Cookson.
The first film watched on the BBC I player, and missed last week because of tiredness concerns a top level sex ring involving prostitutes and teenage virgins brought in from all over the world., The organiser is a senior policeman from the vice squad who when his home is raided is found to have half a dozen women imprisoned in his cellar. During the middle to late 1990’s I was contacted my a mysterious woman representing an organisation concerned with young adults who claimed to have been abused with the care system, and she alleged the existence of such a ring here in the North East, involving senior figures in the public care system and with some police involvement as well as other prominent figures in the community and where those concerned went through the motions of satanic rituals, used children and animals. It is the kind of claim that has been made in other parts of the UK during the past half century and back in Victorian times and before.
In the documentary accompanying the series a number of well-spoken English citizens of Stockholm buying copies of the books at a personal signing session explained that unlike Miss Marple who was a one dimension obvious literary creation, Wallander was a man dedicated to his work with normal human failings and interests, but who maintained a mission against the dark side of Swedish life which he felt was overcoming his country while retaining a belief that if those of good will and with standards worked together things could turn for the better. Early on in this first film Kenneth Branagh tried to help a terrified 15 year old in a field of beautiful yellow flowering rape who when he calls out to her not to be afraid because he is a policeman she pours petrol over herself and sets it on fire. He remains haunted by the death and what he sees as his failure although he was not to know that for this girl who has previously placed her trust in a policeman, he had not only betrayed that trust but led her into horrific sexual violence.
There is an important difference between the portrayal of the Character by Branagh as a much more feeling and emotional expressive individual closer to Morse and Maigret than the characterisation in the Swedish TV series in the episode which I have now experienced. The actor is at one level outwardly restrained although just as explosive when it comes to his won family issues or when faced with the evil human beings can do, sometimes believing they are doing so for good reasons. A feature of all three films is that there are no red herrings, false trails and you are provided with clues, links and connections and where the main story and its outcome, as with Morse, Maigret and Van de Valk are secondary to the exploration of the main character and his relationships with colleagues and with family.
The episode in Swedish is important because it explains what Wallander has become because of his work. He is able to explain this to his graduate daughter who has not just joined the police but successfully applied to join his station after graduation, a graduation which he fails to attend by one day, getting the days mixed up, humiliating his daughter who has taken the step in order to have the relationship with her father she missed during her childhood. He explains that the work became his identity and through the work he felt alive and with purpose but the price was to lose his wife and as be believed a daughter. He had then become destroyed as a social human being without a private life. Eating and drinking too well and usually alone, their relationship and these issues are an intrinsic component of the episode plot. A flock of swans are set on fire, and we learn subsequently filmed. A medical doctor who undertakes abortions is hung in a church. The daughter decided that she does not want to stay with her father and crashes at the home of one of her university/high school friends and who then has a picnic with others friends including one who has a child through artificial insemination and where the friend with whom she is crashes reacts with great hostility because of the unnaturalness of the birth. Later the child is abducted and the attempt made to drown the child according to one biblical passage before taking a van filled with explosives to try and blow up a gay wedding held in a church. The father of the friend disappeared 25 years ago and the daughter admits she has missed him everyday. It is only gradually we learn that he was involved on the Jones town mass suicide of 918 people through poisoning in Guyana in 1978, an internationally assembled agricultural commune, although primarily the individuals came from California and formed the largest collective deaths of North Americans outside of natural causes until 9/11. The father has returned to new fundamentalist religious cult and we learn is the father of his daughters pregnancy. There is a natural justice ending and Wallander and his daughter commenced the relationship they never were able to have previously. It was only when my mother became dependent and child like at the age of 97 that I had the relationship with her never experienced as a child and which was healing for me and helped her to overcome the fear that developed during the period when she obtained some awareness of her past.
I want to begin with the third in the series and the second film watched to date because of the topicality of the main story line, an attempt by fanatics to bring the Swedish financial system crashing by distributing malicious codes wiping out data for political reason rather than theft or blackmail, The sub plot is that his daughter persuades Kenneth who had a depressive streak to stop his existence of work, work and living on his own and to try a dating agency. Unfortunately the attractive divorce is not what she seems and is connected to main story. My only reservation which may reflect how senior police officer‘s operate in Sweden is that too often he makes visits, sometimes dangerous visits on his own. However with the help of teenage whiz kid hacker the financial world is saved and the cause of a series of murders unravelled.
Then at nine on Sunday I experienced the second of the three films in this first series and where the main plot is significantly topical. As with the recent episode of Spooks it involves a plot to destroy the financial system of a country. In this instance by the comprehensive distribution of malicious codes throughout the financial system destroy the data held in those system. Imagine all our.
The related sub plot is that the daughter persuades Kenneth to try and get a life after his former wife announces she wants a divorce to remarry and to try a dating agency and the attractive divorcee is not what she seems and is connected to main story. This was too good an coincidence for my liking. My other reservation which may reflect how senior police officer‘s operate in Sweden is that too often he makes visits, sometimes dangerous visits on his own. However with the help of teenage whiz kid hacker the financial world is saved and the cause of a series of murders unravelled.
I suspect that the original Wallander is too Nordic and Germanic for my Mediterranean soul, something which Italian speaking Branagh is remedying. I am not inclined to go out an but a translated edition of one of his novel. But I am tempted to go back to rewrite my own effort of 1992 and 1993.
So far there is nothing original in the first two episodes of Survivors on BBC1 I watched the first 90 minute episode on BBC i player by mistake but stayed to see what if it offered anything original. At present it appears that over 99% of the population has been wiped out by a virus plaque. There is the suggestion that this was not an accident but only a few second hint so far so it does not merit speculation.
As what happens in such a situation, the subject of countless TV series and films, after coping with the horror of seeing all their families, work colleagues and friends die begin the process of individual and collective survival. I have previously written of the War Time exercise at the national Civil Defence College, I once participated where the actions and decision of fellow local authority chief officers created 80000 more death than necessary but modest additional losses compared to the 235000 or so extra deaths of one previous group, This did not surprise me, or some of the individual decisions and attitudes which revealed what would have had happened had Fascism or Communism taken control on mainland UK. The most depressing aspects was the reconstruction committee held at the end divided between those who saw the opportunity to establish a dictatorship and those who wanted to revert back to the previous ways and approaches which had led to the nuclear devastations of our cities. No one, not one of those directly involved in Committee said stop, first we much be satisfied that the rule of law is established and that basic protection and freedoms are restored as quickly a possible with people fed and clothed. Then we need to sit down together and decide how we are going to ensure that what happened does not happen again. Of course this was said at the end of World War I and II but things have not yet changed for the better.
The second half of the first episode concerned how the main characters come together. A teenage Muslim is left alone alive at Prayers at the Mosque and leaves London for a Northern City to find out if any of his cousins survive. A city whiz kid find himself alone in his penthouse with his girlfriend for night dead alongside him in bed and hooks up with the Muslim and start to play football together in the middle of the M1. A mother says goodbye to her husband as he dies and goes off in search of her teenage son who is away on an outward bound adventure course, but he had an accident and had been taken to the local hospital where she finds everyone dead, but not her son. An African Caribbean Englishman wants to be alone but decides to follow the mother who declares that they need to work together to survive. A killer serving a life sentence is locked in his cells but is then released by a crazed warder sufficient to escape. A doctor loses faith and also heads off from her houseboat and they all meet up and decide to from a community.
And the government, well they are shown as inept and unprepared and die with everyone else except their public relations spokesperson who pretend and pretends misleads and misrepresents for good intentions and for bad until she is forced to admit that most of you are dead, help yourself, try and be good and God have mercy on all our souls, although why God should in such circumstances in something of a puzzle.
In the second episode the age of reality dawns on the group the hard way as they learn that he or she who holds the gun controls everything else except the soul and human spirit. Sub alliances are formed within the group and there is one nee arrival to make it three men, three young women and one boy and no oldies yet.
I then decided to watch the third episode which has three themes. A minor theme was the importance of creative people in a crisis. They need to protect the chickens. My mother kept chickens as did her father, and also rabbits. She would buy little chicks and raise them for eggs and for food. The rabbits were supposed to breed but did not, got more and more fat and eventually she sold them to the butcher and she could not bear to eat them. In this episode they try and build a chicken house and then the creative one ,the financial wizard works out that they need to do is find the nearest garden centre. One Abby, the mother who understands the problem finds the government centre with electricity and water and some supplies and the Government lady press spokesman in charge who has lost her two children and who has a plan the vision of varying out. However this motley small group has one fascist who wants to shoot everyone in sight, as the group has come under attack from those in search of food which is odd given what is still available elsewhere in the community . The woman leader cracks under the strain and shoots a trespasser in order to exert her authority over the rest of the group as much as the intruder, Abby beats a quick retreat go in search of fuel at local farms and come across one where young widower and his two daughters have not been in human contact because of minor food poisoning since the virus attack commenced and have now barricaded themselves in, to the growing horror of the eldest child a girl around twelve. This was the only credible and interesting part of the episode in which the relationship between father and his daughter, the two men between each other and the two men and the daughter is developed beyond the superficial.
No comments:
Post a Comment