Reviews / Everyone harbouring a dark secret
After watching the first part of Shetland 10, our reviewer Tom Morton is not quite convinced by the storyline offered in this latest instalment of the popular crime drama
Full disclaimer: I’m coming to this edition of Shetland fresh from the latest series of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses and the new adaptation of Herron’s Zoë Boehm novel Down Cemetery Road. Both of which are on Apple TV, budgeted in multiples of whatever was spent on Shetland, brilliantly written, acted and directed, and soundtracked by the likes of PJ Harvey, Mick Jagger and Sharon Van Etten.
But set in London and Oxford, both playing a crucial part in the atmosphere of the shows. Shetland is very far away from those urban locations. And yet familiar: I mean, they have mobile phones Up There Where You Can See Norway. And wait a minute – isn’t that Gary Tank Commander? The Very Evil Old woman from Guilt and dozens of other shows? Brynden Tully from Game of Thrones? Her from Ugly Betty and the magnificent Mayflies?
Bargain basement budgets apart, location, location, location is the point. That’s what made the BBC commission no less than 10 seasons of Perez, Tosh and Calder’s pedestrian Midsomer-Murders-with-Sheep-and Fish rural crime saga. It’s Shetland, not Chinatown. It’s the glorious coastline, the vast skyscapes, the sense of isolation and apartness. For the vast majority of those watching, Shetland is as fascinatingly strange-but-familiar, as glamorous and glum as Bergerac’s Jersey, Wallander’s Sweden or Maigret’s Paris.
So let’s start Season 10 (cold opening, as has become the rule) with fish. Tosh and Ruth, the Cagney and Lacey of The Greater Zetlandics are in a car with a dodgy informant called Loud Yin, waiting for the whitefish boat Guiding Light to land heaps of heroin. This is the actual Guiding Light that’s approaching, facility fees, legal disclaimers and permissions presumably signed to avoid any real-life defamation suits, or future misunderstandings with the Excise. When the hordes of coppers descend, nothing but fish and ice can be found. I felt sorry for the actors, ill-equipped for their search. Where were the insulated overalls and memory foam wellies? They must have been perishing.
Photo: BBC/Silverprint Films/Jamie Simpson
Anyway, no mood-altering powder found (and factually, it’s much more likely to have been drug-de-jour cocaine coming ashore hereabouts) the murder call comes in, following some scene-setting with Suspicious Inhabitants of Levenwick, sorry Lunniswick. An old lady called Eadie Tulloch has been discovered dead behind a shed with a very thick mooring rope around her neck. Greg McHugh is an excellent actor but as Colin, in a dodgy fake Barbour jacket, he seems a bit out of place. Then again, so does every one of the Suspicious Inhabitants of Gulberleven. These include a family of tourists in the requisite AirBnB, and a just-out-of-prison Peerie Davie Powell, who has an over-protective maw and a tendency to weep unexpectedly.
Quickly, we’re filled in on Havralunna’s horrible history (fishing tragedy which killed one of the dead woman’s sons) and the other living offspring, Ed, is introduced as a bar manager and lapsed poet, that everyday combination. Soon Ruth and he are exchanging pheromonic glances in a very unprofessional way (for a policewoman; poets and bartenders are allowed to do anything) at a poetry evening in the pub. An everyday Commercial Street occurrence: Blank verse and Buckfast.
Wee Davie Powell has gone missing, but he’s in his late dad’s boatshed, greeting. He’s a convicted burglar and he’s in possession of some of the dead woman’s jewellery. Also, he’s been sacked from his job in a DIY shop for stealing tiles. In one of the most ridiculous explanations ever heard in televisual criminology, he explains that he stole the tiles and used them to retile Eadie’s bathroom in exchange for the jewellery. As you do in a barter society like Lunnaburgh. Grout! Grout! Damned Clot!
Meanwhile, Billy the Polis (and unseen wife Mysterious Morag) go way, way back with Eadie who used to be head of social work family services and therefore has £400,000 in the bank. Fees from unscrupulous abuse of the adoption and fostering system, probably. Anyway Billy’s very upset and Lewis Howden already has more lines in this episode than in all the 10 previous seasons.
You just know that everyone in Channerland is Harbouring A Dark Secret. Especially the old doity wife who pours petrol over and sets fire to Eadie’s resting chair. The entire cottage goes up like the South Mainland UHA galley dowsed in Trawler Rum while Inspector Ruth and Ed the drouthy poet/bartender exchange smouldering looks and he recites a soulful quatrain, or maybe it’s a villanelle:
Och, michty me! No, that’s no’ Shetlandic
Or Shaetlan, were I to be pedantic
In truth, ah’m no’ sure hoo ah spik
Wir accents vary, week to wik
In this strange dramatic show
Where fok are frae, ah dinna know…
Who dunnit, when?
Ah dinna ken.
In conclusion, I can but quote Ruth Calder, in response I think to the Nasty New Fiscal
“I hear it was pretty bad up there?”
“Yeah. As bad as it gets.”
Well. Not quite. Worse things happen in Dunscousness. Or will in future episodes…
