Jeg prøvede! Jeg prøvede! Er, that's Danish for 'I tried, I tried!' As so often I insert these foreign words to provide a veneer of cosmopolitan sophistication into a blog post which is intrinsically a load of old tat about nothing! In fact, when you think about it - er, you do think about it, don't you? - it's pathetic that a man of my supreme wit and wisdom finds himself with nothing else to do but whinge about a foreign TV show! I have spoken to myself very severely about this but the fact of the matter is that I fell seriously in love with Det. Insp. Sarah Lund in The Killing series #1, and I clung to that love through series #2 despite it being a load of old cods, but now I have begun series #3 - and my heart is broken.
This began badly with MDS (My Darling Sarah - but not that one!) lickspittling to the brass in an effort to leave real policing and get herself a nice cushy desk job in administration or something. At a stroke, the total prat who wrote this story destroyed the very essence of MDS who is a woman obsessed with solving the crimes around her. That is why husband, son, boyfriend and mother are all cast aside, not without regret but mostly without hesitation, as she pursues relentlessly her objective. So, to portray her now as a couldn't care less, wannabe desk-jockey was utterly and completely WRONG!
Like series #1, this has a political angle but it is as daft and unrealistic as the much praised (for reasons that totally escaped me!) Danish political non-thriller, Borgen. In the first episode of The Killing there was a political thread, too, but the personal over-rode the political and it worked. In this we have the ludicrous premise that the male prime minister and the female leader of their equivalent of the LibDems are shagging each other and yet no-one knows! Presumably the Danish press has already suffered their equivalent of a Leveson enquiry! In addition, the PM is trying to get the LibDems led by his current 'squeeze' to sign up to a political coalition. It's rather as though Nick Clegg was really Nicola Clegg and Cameron was into a 'leg over' situation. (Yes, I know, not an image one wishes to dwell upon!)
The parents of the little girl who has been abducted are an unlovely couple who are divorcing and, so far at any rate, have failed to induce even a droplet of sympathy from me unlike the never-to-be-forgotten Larsens of series #1 whose roles were superbly written and acted. It's all very disappointing and frankly I blame the EU. I'm not exactly sure why I blame them but I do not want to give Denmark a kicking - I have fond memories of the place and, um, its delightful young ladies - "ah yes, I remember it well" . . . er, where was I? Anyway, there's nothing else to do now on a Saturday night except to talk to the 'Memsahib' about 'footie'!
