THERE have been so many rule-bending, likes-a-drink, personal-life-a-midden cops on TV these past few years that dear old George Dixon now seems like the wild and crazy one for stopping on the steps of Dock Green nick to deliver a comforting sermon t
o the nation, then waddling home to the missus for a cuddle with the Ovaltine – no tongues, and feet on the ground throughout – before the National Anthem and lights out.
The latest, Wallander, promised to take us to a strange land where the accent is impenetrable and where they do something funny with fish. My first reaction was that we already know this place quite well as Taggart's Glasgow, home of the vinegar-not-brown-sauce diktat. But – pleasant surprise – the setting turns out to be Sweden, home of the smorgasbord option, which you'd only confuse with another Glasgow perversion, the oblong sausage, if you were very drunk.
Kurt Wallander is fond of relaxing with a glass of wine or five after a hard day's mavericking (there must be such a verb now). Come the morning, the glass can usually be found on the solid oak floor next to the ergonomically perfect armchair, which is where our hero sleeps. Separated from his wife, he's mothered by his nippy daughter. His dad, meanwhile, keeps painting the same landscape over and over again.
The landscapes in the first instalment were stunning, beginning with the field of yellow rape where a 15-year-old girl set fire to herself in front of Wallander, who seemed slow to spot the danger. Wallander does most things slowly, including talking, shaving and driving his Volvo. Based on the bestselling novels of Henning Mankell, this isn't shaping up to be a series for aficionados of the handbrake turn or the Gene Hunt speciality rabbit-punch. But once inside its world of eerie light, gloomy bars and the sort of male solemnity you most definitely do not associate with the country that has brought us sauna parties hosted by Anita Ekberg, you are lost and you are intrigued. Well, I am.
Quite how long I will remain fascinated by Swedish interiors – like the exteriors, stunning – will depend on Kenneth Branagh. He's Wallander and, great actor as he is, playing Swedish comes easy to him. But can he play detective? Towards the end of the opener, he had to wield a gun. This simply didn't look right; Branagh is a pen-is-mightier man. Then he fired it, just in time to save another intended victim of the phantom scalper intent on hatcheting every member of Swedish high society involved in a prostitution ring. His responses had speeded up dramatically, even though a gun-toting Branagh still seems bonkers, like Jeremy Paxman in low-slung jeans.
Wallander's Sweden isn't the utopia dreamed about before the assassination of the country's prime minister in 1986, a potentially key event for this drama flagged up in the opening minutes by the first victim, himself an ex-politician. "Instead of the world joining us, we joined the world," said this man as he lamented, among other things, Americanisation. But Louis Theroux: Law And Disorder In Philadelphia revealed that Sweden has got a long way to go before it starts to resemble the city they call "Killadelphia".
In Philadelphia, low-slung jeans are very much the fashion. This programme wasn't a good advert for them, and it was a truly shocking one for Timberland boots. A pair were spread on the sidewalk every time a suspected drug dealer was faced down to have his rights read by the city's rapid-response cops. It happens a lot: the city has the US's highest violent crime and homicide rates.
This was unusual territory for Theroux and his faux-naive interview technique: blighted citizens and brutalised law enforcers, all of them with stories to tell. The geeky documentarist isn't normally this serious and relevant, but he was up to the job, riding around the burned-out 24th district in body armour, demanding to know "What just happened?" seconds after the cuffs snapped tight and seeming intent on reviving the just-ended TV crime epic The Wire.
He hung out with the hunters and hunted but the best value was the detective known only as Hunter who introduced him to a man with "Born" tattooed across one set of knuckles and "Thug" across the other; a woman prostituting herself for 24 bags of heroin a day; and the "corner boys" who are the lowest-ranked of the low-slung dealers, earning less than the McDonald's employees in charge of inserting the squares of processed cheese.
No one had any answers to Philadelphia's crime problems. The oldest cop on the beat said they would never go away. When he retired, another cop would step into his shoes. And when the corner boys retired or most likely died, there would be plenty more to fill their Timberlands.
Every night, it seems, you can watch a show about Britney Spears. Most are the TV equivalent of what print journalists call "cuttings jobs", but Britney: For The Record was the girl herself, caught in a rare quiet moment between her successful comeback at this year's MTV Awards and last Wednesday's "wardrobe malfunction", photos of which were pinged round the world.
The programme promised that "no topic was off-limits" and these would include the men in her life. Justin Timberlake "got caught up in the magnitude" of BritneyWorld. Of Kevin Federline, she said: "I married for the wrong reasons, for the idea of it." That sent her on a "weird path".
Was she still on this path? Spears said that rather than her life being out of control, it was too controlled. "There's no spontaneity or passion," she said, yearning to be able to shop in supermarkets like Jessica Alba or feel the "crisp breeze" on her face without 50 paparazzi following her.
What did she want people to believe about her? "That I'm a hard-working girl and that I love my babies."
If she'd left anything out of the film – and she had – then she vowed: "I'll write a good book one day."
