Reviews / ‘Great, nasty fun’: promising start as Shetland crime drama returns
Chapeau! A blistering opening sets the scene for a splendid ninth season of Shetland, writes Tom Morton. But some of the cast need to mind their heads…
Warning: the following contains spoilers and irrelevant musings concerning woollen garments.
On the knitwear front, the lack of decent headwear continues. I mean, I was given a row just the other day for venturing hatless into the wilds of Weisdale for all of 45 seconds. “Tam, where’s yer bunnet?” came the cry. The vicious battering of icy Zetlandic rain on my balding pate was uncomfortable and chilling, and I vowed there and then to wrap my bonce in Fair Isle in all exterior activities. Despite the inevitable itchiness.
An insufficiency of hats. Scarves, though, are in evidence in this series of murderous bloodsoaked Shetland, as opposed to Jeemie the Glum’s next-to-the-skin gansies. I suppose the problem is that TV producers want the faces of their stars to be visible in all their wind-lashed glory. But it makes you worry for those poor actors, losing oodles of body heat for the sake of art.
In Shetland, we know the value of hats. And if you have hair, it helps to keep things under some semblance of control. There was a moment in this episode when Alan Calder, Ruth’s presbyterian brother, minister to the last kirk in Shetland, was on the Victoria Pier in a serious breeze, apparently trying to wash the dirtiest camper van in history, and actor Steven Miller’s copious follicles threatened, blindingly, to send him tumbling into the briny shallows of Bressay Sound.
Anyway, to the start of season…what is it? Incredibly, it’s season nine of Shetland-in-Italics, the second outing for Ashley Jensen as Detective Inspector Ruth Calder, and honestly, the best opening sequence of any series so far. It’s just Ruth’s face, recounting her reasons for actually being in Shetland, giving up the job in London.
Now Jensen is a fantastic actor (her performance in Andrew O’ Hagan and Andrea Gibb’s Mayflies would bring a tear to a wooden leg) but honestly, this scene is incredible, and as the true horror of what’s happening is gradually revealed, the brilliance of the direction also emerges. True, there’s a kind of similarity to the opening of Die Hard With A Vengeance, though in that case, Bruce Willis is about to blow someone’s head off with a hidden gun, not have his own disassembled.
So, Wednesday night, hot Ribena and bannocks to hand, what’ve we got? Malcolm Dick has apparently killed his brother over his affair with Ellie, Malc’s fiancée. Something to do with a trip to Bergen, apparently. This prompts the deathless line from Sandy that Malcolm “used to work on the ferries, so he might have been over there”. Does nobody think to get a Shetlander to cast their eye over these scripts? Oh, wait a minute. Steven Robertson IS a Shetlander. So he should know that the only ferry link between the UK and Scandinavia is between Harwich and Esbjerg in Denmark (though you could go from Newcastle to Amsterdam and then drive to Norway). Bring back the Norrona! Or give us back our money, Smyril Line.
That murder and siege is settled with Shetland’s well-known SWAT team and a single gunshot which appears to hit no-one. Ruth and Tosh reunite with comments about Tosh’s appearance (“are you wearing lippy?”) and then she’s off to a party, as you usually do after a major fatal incident. Both Ruth and Tosh are DIs now, and as the show progresses, they go all Cagney and Lacey, arguing and taking mobile phone calls in cars pursued by aerial drones through bits of Shetland and Ayrshire (though I’m aware that I may be the only person reading this who actually remembers Cagney and Lacey, pioneering female crime fighting duo, the distaff Starsky and Hutch of the 70s; you don’t remember them either? OK…)
Party time in the Brae hall (externally) and bits of Barrowland in Glasgow I think (internally), and there’s trouble between Tosh’s pal Annie and her estranged husband Ian, who drinks lots of whisky on top of the only bottle of champagne ever sighted at a hall hop. Annie and her peerie lad Noah drive away and…vanish into the night. But Annie has something of desperate importance to the plot to tell Tosh and arranges to meet her at 10 the next morning.
But Annie doesn’t turn up. She’s been staying for some reason with sinister Glaswegian crofter John Harris and his two unlikeable louts of offspring. Harris is played by Vincent Regan, an underrated actor who starred in probably the best drama ever about the Northern Irish troubles, Eureka Street: an even better book by Robert McLiam Wilson. Star actor, big trouble looming.
No Annie, and then there’s the first of two creepy house searches by Christine and Mary Beth (sorry, Tosh’n’Ruth) where they find Ian’s crib occupied, by none other than Professor Quirrell from Harry Potter and the Mystery of Mallory Towers, who’s Annie’s former university tutor. He has hot footed his way north and then west from London (“I got a taxi straight here from the airport” – £150, easy, but they take cards, or most of them do) and it’s Ian Hart so more of him to come no doubt.
After that we have the aforementioned hirsute kirk minister on the pier with the dirty camper and a runaway hooligan girl called Lisa. He can’t stop her and ‘Camper Van Angus’ heading to Nesting, where it seems the community development company have, not content with offering Viking funerals, set up a mysterious marine research laboratory. Lisa and Angus are going to Mount A Protest Against Evil Doings. (Note: this’ll be where the mathematics is going. It’s something to do with an underwater gas-powered wind farm!)
Right, but where are Annie, Noah and Ian? Noah turns up, wandering in a bloodied, catatonic state and then warming up next to an unsafe looking convector heater. A clue! There’s plaster on his shoes. For some reason this has not worn off during his trudge through the wet and windy wastes of the westside, or Beith. Is there a nearby house which is being restored or renovated with…uh, plaster? Yes! And it’s very, very creepy indeed, with plastic sheets and everything.
And there Tyne and Sharon stumble into poor Annie, Noah’s mum, dead amid the crumbled Kingspan. Worse, there is a trail of blood (including handprints) and…there we find another dead body? Is it Ian? No, silly, it’s Anton, who’s French and, confusingly, has the second name Bergen. There is no ferry link! Is this the Bergen connecting the Dick murders to the Begg disappearances? Hell, yeah! Cluedo rules! In the creepy house with the lead pipe! Except lead isn’t allowed nowadays, so probably something less toxic.
Right, so to summarise: This is great, nasty fun, and promises much for the rest of the season, though the realism of the bloodiness and the dramatic spikiness may upset some viewers. Cosy crime this is not. I mean, three murders in 24 hours, with a party in between? The Tosh’n’Ruth relationship is feisty and full of petty squabbling. Good chemistry. Jensen brings out the best in O’Donnell. Lots of red herrings, you-can’t-get-there-from-heres and Davie Gardner as The Voice of The Weather. Who could ask for anything more?
Well, I could. More hats!
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