In the 2015 Israeli TV drama False Flag, five ordinary Israelis woke to find themselves the leading suspects in the kidnap and possible murder of the Iranian minister of defence. Suspicionįalse Flag (left) and Suspicion. I still get chills thinking of the scene in which Henriksson’s Wallander pulled back the clothes in his wardrobe to reveal a wall of Post-it notes, each reminding him of something he must not forget. Nonetheless, it seemed wrong that Branagh’s Wallander spoke English yet read Swedish newspapers.įor all his excellence as a detective spiralling into a mid-life existential crisis, Branagh has not yet played Wallander as he descends into dementia, as Henriksson did. Not that it is a competition – each was cherishable.
Over four series (so far), Branagh proved more satisfyingly lugubrious than even the two great Swedish-language interpreters of Wallander, Rolf Lassgård and Krister Henriksson.
Long before Kenneth Branagh decided his destiny was to spend hours in makeup having ludicrous moustaches applied to his face so that he could play Hercule Poirot, he interpreted another Euro shamus, namely Kurt Wallander, the hero of Henning Mankell’s most popular crime series. As Swedish exports go, Äkta Människor proved not quite as successful as Ikea. A Mandarin replicant started broadcasting last year. The Swedish original was cancelled after two series. Later, as in the Swedish version, she became involved with a maverick group of synthetic beings who rose up against their mentally and physically weaker masters. Understandably, she balked at having sex with Katherine Parkinson’s errant husband. Gemma Chan played a domestic robot in Channel 4’s Humans. A year after its release, the format was sold to 50 countries. What’s more, hubots will be illicitly hacked to become humans’ sexual partners. The 2012 dystopian Swedish drama Äkta Människor (Real Humans) posited that, in the near future, hubots (a portmanteau of humans and robots) will be bought as domestic servants, making humans redundant in many workplaces. Gemma Chan in Humans, the UK adaptation of Äkta Människor.
It’s a Knockout was never officially cancelled, but there are no plans for it to return to our screens. It’s a Knockout featured bizarre games, such as the one where a woman was pelted with bags of flour by opposing players while she bounced up and down on a trampoline and attempted to bat away the projectiles with a tennis racket. Only in 1966 did the British get their own version. Live cows and bulls were among those corralled into battles of civic pride so fractious that Charles de Gaulle reportedly altered his schedule so that he could watch the weekly antics. In 1962, French telly bosses, bereft after a dispute prevented the broadcast of the Tour de France, filled the schedule with their own version, called Intervilles. In 1959, a TV gameshow called Campanile Sera pitted teams representing two towns against each other in a series of games featuring obstacle courses. The Tunnel may not be the only reason Brexit happened, but it didn’t help. But the remake added something missing from the original: an Anglo-French relationship of mutual suspicion. In The Tunnel, the cross-cultural dynamic between Helin and Bodnia was replaced by the froideur of a Franco-English mesalliance between the French cop Elise Wassermann (Clémence Poésy) and the British plod Karl Roebuck (Stephen Dillane).Īs in the original, the entente didn’t get very cordiale: there was as much sexual tension between the two protagonists as there was between Michel Barnier and David Davis during Brexit negotiations.
It trumped The Bridge in bleakness since, as you will know if you have spent the 20 minutes on the Eurostar between Folkestone and Calais, it is darker down there than a Scandi noir has ever managed to be. If only anyone had listened to my pitch for an English-Welsh drama that begins with a dead sheep on the Severn Bridge, The Tunnel might not have existed.
The original revolved around the outlandish idea that a corpse had been found on the marvellous Øresund (or Öresund) bridge, straddling two countries and two police jurisdictions.Įnter the odd couple Saga Norén (played by Sofia Helin), a gifted but emotionally distant and socially awkward Malmö detective, and her Copenhagen-based counterpart Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia), a cheery serial philanderer, who have to work together to solve the mystery. This British-French crime drama was adapted from the 2011 Danish-Swedish series The Bridge (Broen/Bron). The Tunnel (left) and Broen/Bron (The Bridge).