Wallander

[DB7]

Branagh to star in Harries crime drama



Andy Harries' indie's first commission is a £6m Kenneth Branagh detective series for the BBC billed as the new Inspector Morse.



Left Bank Pictures' 3 x 90-minute dramas for BBC1 are based on the international best-selling Wallander crime novels, written by Swedish novelist Henning Mankell.



His books, which follow a middle-aged Swedish police inspector, have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.



The three productions will have the umbrella name Wallander and will star Branagh in the title role. The shows are adaptations of the first three novels in the series, Sidetracked, Firewall and One Step Behind, and will be set in Sweden.



Harries told Broadcast: "This is more than just a detective series. It's fantastic drama, great stories and an absolutely beautiful setting. Visually these films are going to be very strong, very picture postcard. Ken Branagh is perfect for the title role."



It is understood the corporation is looking for a big returning detective franchise, in a bid to emulate ITV1's success with Inspector Morse, Cracker and Prime Suspect.



Branagh's last major lead role on British television was more than five years ago when he played explorer Ernest Henry Shackleton in the Channel 4 drama Shackleton. In 2004 he played dotty Uncle Albert in the BBC's Five Children and It.



Branagh said he was a long-time admirer of Mankell's novels. He said: "Wallander is a wonderfully complex and compelling character and I am excited to be playing this fascinatingly flawed but deeply human detective."



The BBC series is being made by Left Bank Pictures in association with Mankell's own production company, Yellow Bird, and Branagh's new outfit, which has yet to be named. It was commissioned by BBC Scotland drama chief Anne Mensah and controller of fiction Jane Tranter.



The international literary success of Wallander means that producers are confident of the productions' global potential.



Each film will cost around £2m to make with cash understood to be coming from a number of sources including the BBC and international pre-sales.



Last year former ITV Productions controller of drama, comedy and film Harries sold a 25% stake in his new company to BBC Worldwide, giving the distributor an exclusive first-look deal on all of its television productions.



* Author: Liz Thomas.

[DB7]

Henning Mankell on Kenneth Branagh's Wallander

Played by Kenneth Branagh and coming to your TV screen. The detectives literary creator on how the phenomenon began

Kenneth Branagh



Kenneth Branagh

Stephen Armstrong



In times like these, our culture needs heroes, but they seem to come and go so irresponsibly. Kings figure in the literary bestseller lists only as fantasy figures alongside wizards; the cowboy really is a man alone; and the warrior has given up facing the enemy with his savage battle cry, preferring to sneak around in the special forces. It’s only the detective who prevails. Perhaps because he is the perfect champion for a world whose leaders lie, whose generals carpet-bomb villages and whose athletes soak up chemicals for a fractional advantage. Flawed, imperfect, often lurching from failure to failure, but plugging on to solve a crime regardless, detectives deliver what little salvation we deserve — although their victories merely hold back the slow creep of the inevitable night.



Raymond Chandler wrote that the detective “must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour. He talks as the man of his age talks; that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham and a contempt for pettiness”. Chandler believed, however, that there were no classics of crime and detection: “Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet.”



Chandler, however, was of the hard-boiled age, which mercifully rid us of the country-house murder in our crime fiction, but kept the constant of the detective, unchanged and unchanging, neither tarnished nor afraid, with no trace of a hero’s vulnerability. These days, that rarely works. Our most beloved sleuths, from Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus to Colin Dexter’s Endeavour Morse, decay, absorbing countless physical and emotional blows, then nursing their wounds, from book to book, with grim resignation and increasing gloom — and, compared to Kurt Wallander, these men seem like Butlins Redcoats.



Inspector Wallander is Sweden’s most successful literary export, an international brand, yet it’s hard to see why at first glance. He is astonishingly miserable, fairly ugly and so monumentally unhealthy, he should have his own dedicated obesity czar. He eats too much fried food, drinks heavily and — across eight novels — has been sued for police brutality, been shot and stabbed, lost his wife in a messy divorce, struggled to build a relationship with his daughter and gunned down a man by accident. He is wonderfully pessimistic about the citizens he guards and usually solves crimes through luck and slog, not cunning inspiration. It’s little surprise that he increasingly believes he shouldn’t be a policeman any more.



The Stockholm-born Henning Mankell writes Wallander as so damn Swedish, it makes your heart sing. Strindberg or Bergman could have created this man with ease. Yet he’s a huge global hit, selling about 30m books in 100 countries, translated into 40 languages. Perhaps it’s because his mission is the greatest a literary sleuth can accept: to explore the dark heart of society and, in his case, the collapse of the liberal Swedish dream. When I meet Mankell, who was a successful author before he created his gloomy gumshoe, he explains that Wallander was born in May 1989, out of a need to talk about the creeping xenophobia he was witnessing in his home country. The first book examines the anti-immigration sentiments that boil over when an elderly couple are presumed murdered by “foreigners”.



“I had no idea this would be the start of a long journey,” Mankell says. “I was writing the first novel out of anger at what was happening in Sweden. And, since xenophobia is a crime, I needed a police officer. So the story came first, then the character. Then I realised I was creating a tool that could be used to tell stories about the situation in Sweden — and Europe — in the 1990s. The best use of that tool was to say ‘What story shall I tell?’, then put him in it.”



Now, however, Kurt Wallander faces twin tests — the publication of a collection of short stories, The Pyramid, which act as a prequel to Mankell’s first Wallander novel, and a BBC dramatisation of the fifth book, Sidetracked, with Kenneth Branagh playing the detective. It’s a challenge on both fronts because, as Mankell explains, the land and people are as important in the Wallander books as the man himself. His thrillers are rooted in the country’s harsh climate, in the shadows lurking behind the bright facade of social-democratic society. The crimes are often obscene, hiding corruption, collusion and conspiracy in the brittle winter of the Swedish countryside. Branagh will have to subsume himself to a landscape shot with the epic sweep of No Country for Old Men. At the same time, Mankell explains that, in writing The Pyramid, he has tried to explain how his hero came to be. This may unsettle his many fans. We start with Wallander as a young beat cop, trying to woo his mercurial girlfriend and solve an elaborate murder that took place next door. As the stories proceed, we see our beloved portly misanthrope develop, but it is a little disconcerting to find the deeply conservative Wallander originally sympathising with antiwar protesters in 1970s Stockholm.



“My ambition from the beginning was to show a man who was always changing, never fixed,” Mankell says. “That is one of the secrets to his success. He has a working-class background, and to become a police officer, he had to choose his place in society. At that time, you had to be conservative. But he’s not completely sure about what’s right and wrong. I call this changing process the diabetes syndrome. After the fourth book, I asked a doctor friend of mine, ‘Having read the books, what kind of disease would you give him?’ She said, ‘Diabetes.’ Immediately. So I gave him diabetes and that made him even more popular.”



Branagh’s relatively trim Wallander doesn’t appear to be approaching the kind of morbid obesity that can induce the condition. He is, however, suitably taciturn, weary and occasionally despairing. In the first drama of what the executive producer, Andy Harries, hopes could become a new Prime Suspect — “Maybe three every two years,” he suggests — Branagh’s Wallander picks at a skein of abuse, teasing out of it self-mutilating schoolboys, a woman escaping sexual slavery who would rather torch herself than accept his help, and a circle of the great and good protected by a sinister former cop. It’s not typical Branagh material — “There’s something very strange, I think, at the heart of Wallander,” he has said — but he somehow pulls it off.



It helps that cast and crew have clearly read the books.



In addition, as Harries explains, a new piece of camera technology became available to them that delivers the depth and sweep of 35mm film in a handheld digital device. Sweden thus appears, by turn, dreamy, hostile, raw and claustrophobic, despite the small screen.



The weakest part of both the show and the new book is the difficult relationship between Wallander and his father, a painter with dementia who hates his son’s job and who paints the same landscape every time he sits at an easel. The conclusion to Sidetracked has a moment of warmth between the two that you would struggle to find in the novels so far translated into English. The Pyramid, meanwhile, explores this tension as it began, touching on reasons why the young Kurt would join the force against his father’s wishes. Mankell is unrepentant. “In a good book, I want loose ends,” he shrugs. “I learnt that from Pinter. So I don’t say why he chose his vocation. But I think maybe he wanted to live a life that wasn’t his father’s. His father paints the same painting all the time, saying, ‘Please, let us have a world that doesn’t change.’ Wallander wants to engage with life and change it.”



In this battle over change that infuses Wallander, Mankell has come close to writing the classic Chandler denied any detective writer at the time had achieved. There’s another, more sinister, conflict there as well. “People see how essential the relationship between democracy and the system of justice is,” he argues. “We know that if the system of justice doesn’t work, democracy is doomed. Wallander is worried about that, and so are many people in democracies. Maybe that’s why he is so popular. I am a very radical person — as radical as when I was younger. So my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it.”



As he picks up his coat to leave, I ask: can your art, can any art, really bring about social change? He stops, smiles and shakes his head. “No,” he says softly. “But you cannot have social change without art.”

[supamum]

It was suggested that I read these Wallander detective stories more than eight years ago and thoroughly enjoyed them. It is always interesting to read about another country and now, hopefully, they have been filmed in Sweden and we will get a flavour of another way of life. I like Kenneth Branagh as an actor.

[716Jones]

name='supamum']It was suggested that I read these Wallander detective stories more than eight years ago and thoroughly enjoyed them. It is always interesting to read about another country and now, hopefully, they have been filmed in Sweden and we will get a flavour of another way of life. I like Kenneth Branagh as an actor.

Supamum, if you enjoyed the Wallander books you might also enjoy the Reykjavik mysteries by Arnaldur Indridason, set (as you might guess) in Iceland. I've read several and enjoyed them all. They'd make a good series, too.

[supamum]

name='716Jones']Supamum, if you enjoyed the Wallander books you might also enjoy the Reykjavik mysteries by Arnaldur Indridason, set (as you might guess) in Iceland. I've read several and enjoyed them all. They'd make a good series, too.

Thank you for the recommendation, I have taken a note of the name and will now be on the outlook for these books. For many years I was in a syndicate who were all keen on the Ross Macdonald and the John D.McDonald books and we used to pass them round. I even made sure that I went to Fort Lauderdale to look for the Busted Flush - but guess what, I could not find it!!!

[Chevyman]

I've read a lot about the Wallander series. I'm looking forward to seeing them



Might delve into the books too

[Chevyman]

Finally, we have a screening date.



Next Sunday, 30 November

[batman]

Something to look forward to on TV ..... at last!

[dpgmel]

Really looking forward to this too, in fact nest weekend I have a Kenneth Branagh fest :



Saturday seeing him in Ivanov and then Wallander on Sunday

[Chevyman]

I came across an interesting Wallander fansite. Quite classy and in English:-



Inspector-Wallander.org, Kurt Wallander & Henning Mankell Fan Site

[Marky B]

I am looking forward to this as well. I wasn't a fan of Kenneth Branagh until I watched his spellbinding performance in Conspiracy,where he played the evil Heydrich.

Ta Ta

Marky B

[Steve Crook]

The cover of this week's Radio Times has a picture of Brannagh as Wallander with the caption Inspector Norse



Clever stuff



Steve

[Pip]

name='Steve Crook']The cover of this week's Radio Times has a picture of Brannagh as Wallander with the caption Inspector Norse



Clever stuff



Steve

Doesn't Norse mean Norwegian? Wallander is set in Sweden. Or does Norse just mean Scandinavian generally?



Pip

[batman]

name='Pip']Doesn't Norse mean Norwegian? Wallander is set in Sweden. Or does Norse just mean Scandinavian generally?



Pip

Norse means anything (people, language, culture) relating to Scandinavia.

[Allen Dace]

These programmes might be of interest :



Who is Kurt Wallander?





Saturday 06 December

9:00pm - 10:00pm

BBC4

John Harvey presents a documentary about writer Henning Mankell, Sweden's most popular author internationally and the creator of the Kurt Wallander detective series. By examining Mankell's anti-hero Wallander, it reveals the hidden angst affecting present-day Sweden, a country with an excellent welfare system yet one which has suffered two shocking recent political assassinations. The film tries to grasp what Mankell's characters say about Sweden and how his books inform the rest of the world.





(Repeated several times through the week)







Wallander





Saturday 06 December

10:00pm - 11:25pm

BBC4

Before the Frost



Original Swedish TV adaptation of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander detective series.



Monday 08 December

10:00pm-11:40pm

BBC4

Mastermind



Another Swedish episode.

[Steve Crook]

name='batman']Norse means anything (people, language, culture) relating to Scandinavia.

"Norsemen" or "Northmen" is also the root of "Normans" because that area of France was settled by Vikings. So 1066 was really the last in a long line of Viking invasions



It is thought to be coincidence that when Harold and his Saxon army faced William and his Normans, Harold's team had just been playing a match at Stamford Bridge. Not the Chelsea ground but the one up in Yorkshire. Where they'd beaten off Harald Hardrare and his Viking/Norse team



Steve

[batman]

I just watched episode one. Terrific stuff with Branagh (and some old familiar faces) on top form. Well produced, directed and written and performed by proper actors, not ex-soap rejects or flavour of the month poseurs. Highly recommended.

[cully]

I was watching this new series and thoroughly enjoying it ( nice and quiet like Wycliffe one of our family said) but I can't have realized how tired I was and I fell asleep before the end.



Who was the murderer??

[autolycus]

Quite agree Batman, and a rock solid camera, which is a rare treat with new drama these days. Not too ott with the music either :-)

[batman]

name='cully']I was watching this new series and thoroughly enjoying it ( nice and quiet like Wycliffe one of our family said) but I can't have realized how tired I was and I fell asleep before the end.



Who was the murderer??

  Spoiler:

The son of the bloke killed in the car park.