The Killing

A layered Danish Thriller

On the Saturday evenings when I stayed in at the start of the year, I was watching ‘Broadwalk Empire’, on Sky’s newly launched channel Sky Atlantic. Though it never reached the heights of some of the great American Drama serials of the last fifteen years, it was decent enough television; there were strong lead performances from great actors including Steve Bescumi, Kelly McDonald and Michael Shannon, and an opening episode that was easily identifiable as being directed by Martin Scorsese.

It was admittedly hard work sitting through episodes I hadn’t recorded, and couldn’t fast forward between the ridiculous amount of ad breaks, but I stuck with it, because the best American drama (such as The Sopranos, The Wire, West Wing, Dexter and Six Feet Under) has shown that television can be a superior medium to cinema. The long-running serial allows multiple-storylines, complex plots, characters to have real depth and personality, as well as a sub-context only previously achieved in great novels.

While I was watching ‘Broadwalk Empire’, BBC4 was showing the Danish drama ‘The Killing’ (translated from 'Forbrydelsen'), which did all of the above, and more. With 20 episodes and one main plot, it eschewed conventional television rules, while perfectly living up to the billing it gives itself in it’s opening titles – a thriller.

I became conscious of ‘The Killing’ midway during its first airing in BBC4, mainly because of its mentions on Twitter and in the Radio Times. It was too late to catch up on it then, and I stayed away from finding anything else out about it, as I planned to watch it at some point; thankfully, BBC4 re-ran all 20 episodes again over four weeks, with the conclusion last night.

All I knew about it when I settled down to watch the first episode less than a month ago was that it was a Scandinavian series, with a lead character, a detective called Sarah Lund, who wore woolly jumpers. (I have since read the jumpers represented both the character’s independence and sense of community spirit. Can’t argue with that).

It was engrossing from the start, while early impressions hinted at themes from other dramas. The beginning reminded me of early episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’, and I also thought ‘The West Wing’ may have been an influence, with a number of characters fighting an election in City Hall. (The 20 episodes/20 days may have also been a formula from ‘24’, a programme I have never seen).

But all thoughts of televisions formulas and references are soon forgotten, as the drama takes hold. ‘The Killing’ works so well as a thriller because as a viewer, we are always being led down particular paths (some of them blind alleys) by a wonderful combination of writing, direction, camera work, and use of music. From red jackets to red herrings, we are always at the mercy of the plot.

The acting is also first-rate; in an interview with Alison Graham in the Radio Times (26^th March 2011), Sofie Grabol who plays Sarah Lund, said the actors were only given the scripts on an episode-by-episode basis, and they were shot in sequence, with none of the cast knowing who committed the killing for months into filming.

The dark lighting and bleaker shades that are constant in ‘The Killing’ always suggest death and danger, and not just when Lund is going into the unknown; in episode 16 for example, an ordinary daytime meeting held in City Hall is so dimly lit, the overbearing light comes from the sun shining through the big bay window opposite the primary camera shot, so the main players almost look like silhouettes, making a mockery of traditional television story-telling.

Meanwhile, all the characters are rounded; as if created by Dostoyevsky, some of them linger in our mind long after an episode has ended, giving pause for thought and appearing in our dreams, as we gradually learn more about them. Like the story, aspects of the characters are slowly fed to us. No-one is perfect, whether it be due to making massive misjudgements, using racist language, or keeping dark secrets. Over 20 episodes we are taken through the mill, both with the emotions of the characters, and the ever unfolding developments of the plot. And the next episode can never come soon enough.

The scheduling of the rerun of The Killing at peak-time, five consecutive nights a week, was a masterstroke on the part of BBC4; many of the great US dramas mentioned earlier were first consumed by us, the viewing public, on DVD, and a 20 episode season of a quality drama would have been comfortably eaten up inside 4 weeks.  

The BBC has heavily invested in making original drama itself this year, and delivered ‘The Shadow Line’, a bona-fide British Thriller which had wonderful characters, a brilliant cast, a chilling plot and more twists than a Chubby Checker convention. It is a British Drama that ranks alongside ‘Our Friends in the North’, ‘GBH’ and ‘This Life’, all of which had more episodes to play with; admittedly not a second was wasted in the seven episodes of ‘The Shadow Line’, although occasionally the dialogue seemed less natural than in ‘The Killing’ (or at least the translation we saw).

But with the BBC licence fee frozen for the next six years, as another political act of the current Con-Dem Government (who at the same time are letting private train companies raise their fares around 8% in the next year), there is little chance the nation’s main broadcaster will invest in a 20 part prime-time drama, as DR, the Danish equivalent of the BBC, did with ‘The Killing’.

And that is a shame. In a week where a big arms fair has taken place in London aimed to boost exports in a failing economy, ‘The Killing’, a Danish export finer than Carlsberg, has been a reminder of the value of well made original television drama.

These past four weeks have flown by (except for the 23 hours in between episodes). Even at the end, like life, there were still some loose ends, but after twenty hours of a developing story there was enough information given for an audience to think for itself.

An intelligent, layered drama, with confidence in its viewers, BBC4 is the perfect place for it. And Season II can’t come quickly enough.

MG

My e-book which has echoes of Glory from the words of Bruce Springsteen to Danny Blanchflower, as I travelled through Europe in the 2010-11 Season, is now available to buy from either Amazon or Smashwords.

Mixing Pop and Politics

Walking into the Logan Hall yesterday initially brought back a Pavlovian memory of a very different occasion, back at the turn of the century, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown joined forces in the spirit of “my enemy’s enemy is now my friend”, trying to dissuade London Labour Party members from electing Ken Livingstone as London Mayor. On that midweek evening in winter there were queues round the block and people locked out, such was the demand to be in the audience; Alastair Campbell and the then recently defected Shaun Woodward manned the stairwells, communicating via headsets like a New Labour Secret Police.

The anti-Livingstone message of course, thankfully, had no effect, but the audience were allowed to ask questions on anything, and they did. The everlasting memory of the night was seeing Blair, who spoke charismatically throughout, talk with real passion and genuine belief in favour of international intervention in oppressed countries in order to save lives, withstanding the hostility he was facing from a questioner who was asking about Britain’s specific interests in the then more innocent age of the time, pre-9/11.

Yesterday’s event was something completely different, the Compass’ annual conference, this year entitled ‘Building the Good Society’. I was a guest of Philosophy Football, supporting them on a day when they staged their first ever Compass Seminar, which was on the subject of engaging people in politics. Unlike most seminars it started with a live song from Maddy Carty  and a short five minute You Tube film on Egypt by student Sanum Ghafoor A panel of Pat Kane, (the writer once of Hue and Cry), Heather Wakefield  (Unison National Officer) and Deborah Grayson (writer and activist) followed, discussing social networking as Jessica Riches tweeted throughout, while also touching on ideas including the “franchising” of future Uncut protests, so demonstrations take place simultaneously nationwide, as well as the collective experience of being involved in politics through both music and comedy. 

The main event of the day though was a Question Time debate in the main conference hall, expertly chaired, with both decisiveness and humour, by The New Statesman’s Medhi Hasan. In contrast to television’s Question Time, there was no dumbing down, and there were proper answers from a strong panel. The panel included Polly Toynbee, whose writing I was first introduced to in an English Language lesson at school, at a time when she still worked for the BBC; I went onto write about her in a final Public Relations exam I had at University the day after she was the subject of a typically misogynistic attack by the Daily Mail, and remain a big fan of her books and regular Guardian columns. (When I first arrived at the conference and was standing behind the Philosophy Football stall, I took the opportunity, to say hello to her as she was passing – always nice to speak to people you admire).

Also on the panel was Green MP Caroline Lucas, Labour’s rising star Chuka Umunna (who was speaking in between appearing at three separate London school fates), Baroness Professor Ruth Lister, and the always engaging, intelligent and incisive John Harris. Earlier in the day I had gone to a seminar where Harris was speaking on how the Labour Party can engage with the progressive left, where he highlighted the need to not be complacent. In the main session he told how due to the ridiculous First Past the Post electoral system, he, a Labour activist, was compelled to campaign for a Liberal Democrat at the last General Election in order to stop a Tory winning, something he said, to the cheers of the crowd, he would never do again.

Harris is such a good speaker because as well as being intelligent, he is always honest, and speaking in favour of nuclear power as a viable source of energy compared to unclean coal, as he did in this debate, was both intelligent and honest, if not universally popular in the room, and certainly not on a panel with The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas.

Lucas was also critical about the perception of Labour Party’s recent focus on benefit fraud, saying they were targeting people fighting to get by, and inferring they were punching down rather than up; Chuka Umunna acknowledged there was disproportionate coverage of benefit fraud which, according to the figures he quoted, cost the Treasury £800m a year compared to Banking Sector issues that cost £1.3 trillion.

The profile on Compass’ Twitter Page explains that Compass is committed to building a good society, with greater equality and democracy, and that is what this Question Time was ultimately about. In one question a member of the audience told of the banning of girls wearing trousers at a school, giving a perfect example of the unaccountability of decision makers that have risen up in David Cameron’s “Big Society”, an idea flawed on so many levels.

The deficit is a very thin disguise to the severe ideological and political cuts Cameron’s Government is making to state spending, and it was this that was inevitably at the root of most of the questions from the floor. In the answers, there was general agreement that as well as a pay-ration in the public sector, there should also be one in the private sector. Caroline Lucas also pointed out the fallacy of the coalition’s talk of protecting front-line services while making cuts to back-line services that the front-lines services depend on to run properly.

Impending industrial action, the “Labour of Love” Hue and Cry once sang about, that may stem from the cuts was of course discussed. All the panellists, while defending the right to withdraw labour, were vary of long strikes; echoing Ed Balls’ recent public comments, Umunna suggested a long drawn-out strike was exactly what this Government wanted to turn the public mood against state workers; Polly Toynbee said long strikes should always be avoided unless they were certain to produce a win; and John Harris, stylishly getting to the heart of the matter as always, pointed out how poorly the case had been made by unions so far for striking – there is a case to be made that public sector workers are on low-pay that hasn’t been made but the idea of “gold-plated pensions” have got to be ditched and comparisons with the miners strike were particularly bad.

In sharp contrast to the Blair-Brown axis against Ken Livingstone over ten years ago now, both the main debate and the conference were progressive and forward looking with Umunna at one point, perhaps unwittingly, using the Bruce Springsteen lyric, “the ties that bind” when talking about the next steps with The Labour Party. The days for in-fighting and political naivety need to be over as from the IMF to the current coalition government, the monetarists are currently calling the shots and quickly unravelling the fabric of what a good society is built on. Those of us who do believe in a Good Society need to co-ordinate, communicate the message clearly and present an alternative. This conference was a good start.

European Cup Final 2011 – A View from the Front-Row

So I went to the European Cup Final at Wembley last night. My season attending Champions League games from a qualifier in Berne, to how I got into the Final in the front row of the Barcelona end in a seat not for sale, is a piece of writing, full of stories, I will save for another occasion. For now, I am going to concentrate on yesterday’s match, starting with a bit of perspective.

I am assuming anyone reading this doesn’t need me to outline the importance of the occasion, but suffice to say, of the many hundreds of football matches I have been to, this was up there. And while it didn’t involve my own club, it had the two clubs I admire most outside my own.

My allegiance to Barca stems from the political, enforced by Jimmy Burns’ ‘Barca: A People’s Passion’, (which I read in the late nineties), and ignited by sparkling football. They have been an exciting team since I first started watching football, by which time they had already had been touched by the hands of Rinus Michels and the first coming of Johan Cruyff in the seventies; but as I said in my last piece on ‘Moving The Goalposts’, this current side is taking the beautiful game to new levels.

When they have the ball they make the pitch as big as possible, and on the rare occasions they give the ball away, the compress the space. The approach manifests itself with their centre-backs always giving the keeper two options to pass the ball out, and two of their forwards having a starting position where they hug the touch-line; yet the movement of the whole team, and the front five in particular, is always fluid and exciting. Comfortable in possession, and with players with exceptional technical ability, they are not just the best the club side in the world at moment but are correctly recognised one of the best of all time.

Manchester United meanwhile have proved to be the best side in England for nearly twenty years now. They are alone as being an English club other than my own that I like to do well in Europe (of the teams that qualify regularly). When I grew up watching football in the eighties, Liverpool were the dominant force in England, back passing their way to league titles, mastering the art in killing time, and getting results; they had glory-hunting supporters, a fawning media and even more deferential referees. In the nineties, United turned the tide, playing football with a flair and an attacking intent, more like the Spurs team that I was lucky enough to start supporting in the early eighties.

When United celebrated their first league title in 26 years with a cracking free-kick from a 19-year old Ryan Giggs in 1993, they were a breath of fresh air, and went on to deliver domestically in the following years. As their manager has always acknowledged though, they under achieved in Europe, apart from the treble winning year in 1999, and he scrapped plans to retire in 2002, after not finishing on the high of winning the European Cup at Hamden Park, as he envisaged.

Last night was their third final in four years though, but as with the last in 2009, Barcelona outplayed them for large parts of the game, and went onto deservedly lift the trophy, leaving an image on the big screen at Wembley last night, that was similar to the one on TV screens two years ago after the final whistle, with a disconsolate Giggs and Scholes dissecting the game.

Even in his 38^th year, Giggs could still walk in any English team in the country, and it was no surprise that United’s equaliser came from his assist. Time and again over twenty seasons he has been the best player for the best team in the country, and is still their most influential on the pitch. He has been easily been the best British player of his generation, and is one of the greats of all-time.

The equaliser came at a crucial time last night, because after Barcelona opened the scoring seven minutes earlier, Wayne Rooney was berating the rest of the team, who as they were regrouping at the centre circle looked like they were getting up after a count of 8 in a boxing ring. And had Barca added a second quickly, United could have been ripped apart.

United had started promisingly though. It is often forgotten that in the first ten minutes of the 2009 Final, United looked dominant, with Ronaldo taking the attack to Barca, and their tails up. The opening goal by the clinical Samuel Eto in the 10th minute changed the game dramatically, and Barca suddenly took control. They dominated for the rest of the match, and with all their attacking talent on the pitch, there was always the likelihood they would score a second, and they did, with the head of Lionel Messi.

Last night United bravely tried to press Barcelona from a higher starting point, and looked lively for the first ten minutes again. Park was breaking up play, tucking in from the left, and Carrick and Giggs looked good on the ball. They looked to me like they identified the inside left channel as area to profit from, in-between the attacking but defensively suspect Daniel Alves, and the makeshift centre-back Javier Mascherano. They tried to play both Rooney and Javier Henandez in there, but Barca stuck to their principles, and steadily began to push upfield, catching Henandez offside four times in the first 21 minutes, and after defending well for the first ten, took the game to United, by simply passing and moving as a team.

Xavi and Iniesta were at their best last night, finding angles, giving options, and both an attacking threat. And it was Xavi’s incisive pass that picked out Pedro to score the opener on inside 27 minutes, a goal that was coming as Barcelona again had taken control.

Pedro played from the left last night, and David Villa the right, a change in their positions from the last time I had watched them in the flesh, a few weeks ago in the League game away at Real Madrid. But the movement as always was fluid, and Pedro made a darting run in the inside right position, to score quickly inside Edwin Van Der Sar’s near post.

Van Der Sar has had an excellent final season for United, and while he made a few saves yesterday, it wasn’t his night. Replays of Messi’s goal showed that the ball wasn’t in the corner, although Messi’s quick feet seemed to catch both him, and the defenders in front of him, out. Like Barca’s first, the second goal was coming. The United players were out a few minutes before Barca before the second-half began, but when the whistle blew, Barca were at it straight away, winning successive corners, and playing the game almost exclusively in United’s half.

That the goal was scored by the best player in the world was fitting, and it was a pleasure to celebrate with the Barca fans, with Messi running over and looking at us in the eyes as we were celebrating after that ball hit the back of the net. An unforgettable moment.

A couple of seasons ago I went to the Wembley Cup, and while Messi didn’t play on the first day against Spurs, it was interesting just to watch him warm up, passing the ball in a triangle with team-mates, almost always with his left foot. The following day he played 45 minutes against Al Ahly, in the position that is now his own, in a central role of a front three with licence to drop off, and move anywhere.

I have now been lucky enough to see him play in the flesh a further two times since, including last night, and he is with Maradona, the best player I have seen. Unlike Maradona, it is likely he will be more popular; when the ball went over the line for his second goal in the semi-final against Real Madrid, it was hard to believe there was any non-Real Madrid true football fan who didn’t shout with joy.

After his goal last night, it seemed a matter of time before Barca scored the third, and it came from David Villa. Villa was disappointing when I saw him play at the Bernabeu in the La Liga last month, but he got the goal of the night yesterday, beautifully bending the ball in the top corner, which no keeper could have saved.

United had little options on the bench, certainly none that could reverse the red and blue tide. Nani came on for the injured Fabio, with Valencia going to right-back, an intelligent substitution, but it had no real effect. Valencia, who was lucky not to get a booking in the first-half, picked up a booking after the change, but it was by and large a clean game, and a total contrast to the as a spectacle of the semi-final, when Real Madrid’s negative, spoiling tactics failed.

After winning his first European Cup with two goals from substitute strikers in 1999, I guessed that Sir Alex Ferguson would pick both Berbatov and Owen on the bench, but news which came through on twitter that Berbatov was left out of 18, proved correct.

I remember when Berbatov left Spurs to join Man United, his “dream move”, he said he felt it was like joining The Beatles. Last night, he must have felt more like Pete Best then George Best.

Ferguson didn’t even try with Owen, knowing that there were no chances being created to be put away. Only Giggs and Rooney offered United any hope at this stage, Giggs going out on the left, with Park inside, and still looking as likely as any United player to give them a lifeline. Rooney had one great chance, almost made on his own, but he shot just over, and after that Barca looked as likely to get a fourth, as United did of making it a tense final few minutes.

Barca were worthy winners, and they could conceivably get stronger if they strengthen their squad, and as long as the manager stays. Pep Guardiola is a classy manager, and I was sure that he would bring Carlos Puyol on for the final few minutes, and he did. But there was more, and Eric Abidal going up to lift the cup will be noted when the book on Barca’s achievements in the 21^st Centaury is written.

FCB are a proper team, and this side is the best example yet, that winning medals and playing attractive, attacking football, go together.

MG

My full story of the Journey of the Champions League 2010-11, from a qualifier in Switzerland to the front row of the final via the epic series of Clasicos, is now available as a e-book from Amazon and Smashwords.