Letters / Better next time, please
The parallels in recent times to the forthcoming series of Shetland would be the TV soap Two Thousand Acres of Sky mainly filmed around Port Logan in Dumfries and Galloway and Hamish Macbeth filmed on location in the village of Plockton.
Both series featured scenery from various locations in the west of Scotland and were a marvellous showcase for that area.
There is no guarantee that the new series Shetland will be an excellent showcase for these islands.
If done well the background to the new stories should be an excellent showcase for Shetland’s unique landscape, but if done badly it could actually put visitors off coming to Shetland.
The pilot programme Shetland had some good local scenery in it but for some strange reason they wanted to pretend it was winter and Up-Helly-Aa time, neither fact having anything to do with the main storyline.
Accents or clothing in the programme don’t actually matter to the story; these days you hardly ever hear ‘Shetlan’ spoken on ‘da Street’ or see a Fair Isle ganzie (apart from on the ponies who wouldn’t be seen dead without one, except in Tesco).
Two Thousand Acres of Sky and Hamish Macbeth had excellent stories and were well told; unfortunately the pilot programme Shetland was a poor story badly told, and had less than favourable reviews in the national press.
These reviews and associated articles are just as important (if not more so) in giving an impression of Shetland as the programme itself.
I hope the new series is better written and better presented than the pilot, and get better reviews as a consequence.
Allen Fraser
Shetland Geotours
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