Jim Kelly

WALLANDER and the Fens: January 16

The BBC have clearly scored a palpable hit with their ambitious adaption of Henning Mankell's Wallander books. This second series, which finished, last night, is - if anything - better than the first. There are two stars for me: the Swedish sense-of-place and landscape, and the astonishing central performance by Kenneth Branagh. Let's take the tour de froce of the acting first. One of Mankell's brave innovations has been the idea of the lone sleuth. In the books this defines the style of the narrative because we end up almost living inside Wallander's head, because he does not have the traditional side-kick with whom to share his thoughts. This gives the books a strange claustrophobic feel. In adapting the books for the screen there was a clear problem - how would we know about Wallander's interior life if he never talks about it ? I suspect they toyed with the idea of bumping up one of the secondary characters to meet the role of Father Confessor. But I'm told that it was Branagh who really got this project on to the screen - ITV having turned it down. He became the project's cheer leader, as it were. So it's no surprise that they declined the soft option of creating a 'duo' of sleuths, and instead relied on Branagh's ability to project what is going on inside Wallaander's mind through his face, body, and actions. The result is incredible TV. As one reviewer commented, Wallander seems to have eyes like bags of cement, but we still get to see into his soul. The second brave decision is the landscape. I can't be the only one who has watched the production and seen in the brooding Swedish low-country a revelation. And the interiors are oddly unsettling as well - dark, barren, cold. The colours are chosen with a painter's care - the muddy greens, greys, and browns. There's a hint of nostalgia too - this isn't a shiny Scadanavian vision at all, but a kind of 'fifties glance back, to an age of utility furniture, and a life still firmly connected to the countryside. The BBC filmed the whole series in Sweden - deciding to take the hit of the extra costs to get the authentic, and unsettling reality of a foreign land. The only place I can think of that would have given them a decent 'second best' is the Black Fen, here around Ely. With each episode there seem to be more faint echoes of East Anglia - the wind farms, the low, sandy coast, the small towns, the travelling fairs, the long desolate roads. While Wallander nevers seems exactly 'at home', I can't help feeling he'd recognise the landscape, in a heart beat.