So long, Scandinavia. Bonjour, Benelux! BBC4, your subtitle-friendly channel, has filled the hole left by Nordic-noir The Bridge with Belgian crime drama Salamander (Saturday). At first, I thought this might involve a series of murder mysteries set in Flemish country houses, all solved by a dapper English detective called Horace Parrot. Not to be. Salamander is a 12-parter that kicks off with a break-in at the very heart of evil, a private bank in Brussels. The robbery eventually lands incorruptible police investigator Paul Gerardi (Filip Peeters) in the midst of a dangerous conspiracy, as he is chased by all manner of crooks keen to protect secrets they’d kept in their safe-deposit boxes.
Salamander, like its amphibian namesake, is a creation at once sleek and slow-moving. It took 12 TV minutes for six men to rob the bank — an eternity. Even I could crack a high-security facility in that time (I think). The dialogue was both spare and laboured, while clichés abounded — the lone good cop, the 66 stolen safety boxes, the banker baddies with their bald pates and sinister spectacles, a community of monks. Yet it was also gripping. The aesthetic was elegant, showing off Belgian architecture — less showy than French buildings, more grandiose than Nordic ones — to good effect. Gerardi, craggy-faced, with bohemian grey hair and a beard, was like a Rodin statue come to life. I will keep watching, if only to soak in the Brussels atmosphere and to find out what the monks are up to.
Did I say ‘so long, Scandinavia’? Not so fast. Midsomer Murders (ITV, Wednesday), epitome of the pastoral English whodunnit, fêted its 100th episode by setting it partly in Denmark, with Ann Eleanora Jorgensen from The Killing and Birgitte Hjort Sorensen from Borgen making appearances as Copenhagen cops.
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