Out of kilter

Can a critic simply be wrong, in the way that a mathematician who said that 3×3=10 would be wrong? I’m beginning to wonder, since I am the only person I’ve read who thought Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short was not vile but terrific and The Killing II (BBC4, Saturday) all right, though far from the work of genius others believe.

I never quite caught the first series of The Killing on BBC4, though I have tried. I do have the box set, and one day I might even watch it. Mind you, suspicions were aroused when the main talking point seemed to be the heroine’s knitwear. ‘Say what you like about the plot moving like an arthritic snail, but that Faroe Islands sweater really caught the eye!’ Sarah Lund, the Danish detective, seems clever and dogged, but not what you’d call interesting, unlike Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison, or any Jane Marple.

Rather than The Killing being the kick-start for a whole new genre of real-life, stripped-down cop shows, it seems to owe much to the long line of British ’tecs. It has the same clichés. We hear that the murdered woman’s husband has been found fleeing, covered in blood, so we are sure he is innocent. Then he confesses, so we know for a fact that he didn’t do it. There are the familiar political cynics with their own agenda, determined to obstruct the honest detective. Sarah Lund picks up a piece of cellophane at a family party. Since it had wrapped a video cassette, and since there was cellophane at the scene of the crime, she knows that the killer filmed his victim’s death. If Poirot had done that, we’d have been chortling about Agatha Christie’s flimsy plot devices.