Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Six months as a TV critic, and I’ve seen enough corpses to last a lifetime

Must every series begin with the naked, lifeless body of a young woman?

[Getty Images/iStockphoto]

It was Shetland that tipped me over the edge. Not the place, but the TV series. Although that’s set in the place. So both, really. It’s a crime drama, see, and people keep getting murdered. Roughly speaking, so far, there’s been a corpse every episode. Which by the end of the series will mean eight corpses. Which, given that there are only 20,000 people in Shetland, means that Scotland’s most northerly islands have a murder rate roughly comparable with that of Belize.

Or higher, even, because my calculations assume that a series happens in a year, and that we are seeing all the murders there are, rather than just the ones that Dougie Henshall gets called out to. Frankly, it makes the place seem terrifying. But then a lot of places are. According to the internet, Copenhagen only has 12 murders a year, although I think that must be a bit out of date because we had more than that in the second series of The Bridge. And granted, some of those might be the responsibility of Malmö (there’s a bridge), but there’s also The Killing to contend with. And Sweden has enough on its plate, what with Wallander and all the rest.

Not that Britain is much better. Over the space of the past six months, and simply off the top of my head, I have been confronted with messy violent British death in Line of Duty, The Fall, Broadchurch, Babylon, Sherlock, Luther, Whitechapel, The Escape Artist, What Remains, Poirot, DCI Banks and lord alone knows how many others. It’s an abattoir out there. It’s a charnel house. ‘O my brother,’ as the man said in A Clockwork Orange, ‘the red, red claret was on tap.’

‘So watch something else, then,’ you might very well say.

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