Jul 3rd – Scandi-noir and Brexi-gris.

Some people subscribe to the view that from the Urals to the Atlantic, we are doomed never to know how alike we are for our failure to speak the same language.

I like this perspective on international relations. I once lived in France – for about five years altogether, and of all the strange things that happened there, none was quite as odd as to see the universal appeal of a TV show called Inspector Barnaby. It’s called Midsomer Murders here, and dear me, we know it to be execrable pap for the weak minded, but there, everyone from the mayor’s wife to the man who trimmed the hedges, would drop what they were doing and rush home to the tele as soon as the windy refrain of the theremin floated its way across the meadows. You see, they projected their view of English refinement onto it. That England was never like that, and that we don’t possess villages with a reliable annual turnover in murders, was never relevant; what mattered was that it fulfilled their notion of an unattainable Englishness which they slightly revered.

I’ve always thought about Scandi-noir in a similar way – had it only been in English, everyone would have realised how dreadful it was. It’s foreign-otherness, accessed by approximately translated subtitles, encouraged us to project notions of sophistication we believe are lacking in ourselves onto that which we didn’t understand.

If my French neighbours had been offered FREXIT in those days, they’d have voted something like 90% to 10% to leave. Their view of the EU being much the same as that which delivered Brexit here, that the bureaucrats in Brussels had no right to make pronouncements about the way they lived their lives. Any time now, we in the UK, are about to realise that the true home of the infuriatingly out-of-touch politician and bureaucrat is Britain, not Brussels. France has been denied this special form of enlightenment, by its leaders who were better tuned-in to the parochial ignorance of their subjects. They understood in a way that our elite boys’ school graduates could never quite grasp, that their voters’ perception of the EU was based on the fear and veneration of strangers.

And, just as the scales fall from our eyes with the EU project, so it does with Scandi-Noir, because some idiot’s finally gone and done it. Have you seen Before we die? [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13125694/]. First aired in Sweden, and watched by viewers here with subtitles, it was received as another S-N hit. Subsequently re-made with an English cast, a (re-written) English script, and shown on Channel 4 in the UK, we got to see it as it really was. Good gracious. There are only so many times we can use words like pitiful, lacking, flawed, pathetic, juvenile, lamentable, before you have to resort to swearing, emojis, and internationally acknowledged symbols for danger, but, and this is often said too, how this exercise in uselessness ever got past the first draft, is whodunnit enough for this drama.

This is what Lucy Mangan of The Guardian said: “Based on a Swedish series, this dire Channel 4 police drama boasts downright woeful acting – and a script that seems cobbled together via Google Translate.” [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/may/26/before-we-die-review-a-weak-bleak-hour-thats-totally-lost-in-translation]. I agree, it is very poor, and has been made much worse than it need be, by a truly abysmal screenplay – in his short career, ex-Channel 4, Head of Media, Matt Baker, has produced four stinkers out of four attempts (Hotel Portofino, Professor T, Suspect, and this. I wonder how they got to be aired?) His translated screenplay here reads like a sixth-former’s take on how grown-ups speak and relate to each other. And yes, besides the jaw-droppingly awful performances from some of the support cast, Lesley Sharp must soon exhaust our collective tolerance for watching her sulk her way through paint-by-numbers am-drams like this. BUT, as much as these things undoubtedly contributed to making a bad thing worse, can we not say that it might have been very bad to begin with? I mean, one of the Guardian’s main criticisms was that the script was too literally translated – that at least implies that the plot wasn’t changed much from the original.

And how else might we judge that which we can barely understand? Take away the dark, cold, wet and bleak landscapes (I know it’s difficult for northern Europeans to imagine this; and understandable that they were entranced into stupor by the alien atmosphere that these programmes evoke) and instead, judge the quality of this genre by its story. Take another look at The Killing – the place where it all began. In your head, put Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp, and that bloke who played Bob in Bob and Sue and Rita too, into leading roles, speaking in English, then reimagine it. Oh look, they devoted an episode to each unlikely suspect in turn, then went back to the obvious contender in the last of the series, and it was him. The one who’d appeared to be most concerned about the death, and was so intimate with the bereaved that he was practically a family member. That gormless, shifty, twerp who was studiously ignored for first twenty-odd episodes and treated as if he was above suspicion (apart from me shouting at the tele from episode 1, ‘It’s him, you fucking idiots!’). The whole thing hid behind the faux-sophistication of subtitles, and its dark and sombre mood. My French neighbours think that Inspector Barnaby is for smart people. No further questions your honour. Tak.

I defy anyone who feels any sympathy towards this view, to watch Borgen, and tell me that it is not an exercise in mediocrity every bit as pathetic as Marcella, Doctor Foster, The Sister, Dublin Murders, London Spy, Black Bird, Suspect, Bancroft, Hotel Portofino, Submarine, Beecham House, Traces, Maryland and all the others, too numerous to recall, that fill up the winter schedules on Sunday evenings in the UK. Like many of them, it sought to trick us into believing that it was highbrow through no more than the subject it tackled, and some Danish weather.

Yes, I really do agree that Matt Baker makes his own special contribution to making Before we die much worse than it need be, but not all of it can be explained away by saying ‘lost in translation.’ What he did, was to make a pig’s ear out of a sow’s ear. The real issue to conjure with here is why, in Europe, we are consistently fed a diet of half-arsed nonsense by way of drama, whilst in America, their output constantly surpasses the standards they’d previously set.

Matt Baker alone stands as proof that our commissioning editors are the sort of people who could not be trusted to judge an IQ contest between Joey Essex and Bobby Seagull, but there is more to it than just that. Perhaps it is that there may yet be some good to come of Brexit – when we have to cooperate with the USA under the terms of a comprehensive trade deal, instead of vying against our continental friends. When the day comes to decide which of our TV companies get the gig, it will be interesting to see how many Matt Bakers, promoters of Scandi-Noir, and ITV & C4 commissioning editors survive the change.

We’ll talk about all that next time.  Now, that’s what you call a cliff hanger.

Never suck eggs.
Cubby Begge.