This Matthew Graham episode of Doctor Who set in a grimy industrial future is classy, stylish and nicely unsettlingThis article titled “Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh – Series 32, episode 5″ was written by Dan Martin, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 21st May 2011 18.30 UTCSPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have been watching the new series of Doctor Who. Don’t read ahead if you haven’t seen episode five – The Doctor’s WifeDan Martin’s episode four blogNeil Gaiman live Q&A “You poured in your personalities; emotions, traits, memories, secrets, everything. You gave them your lives. Human lives are amazing. Are you surprised they walked off with them?”It’s that time of year again. We’ve been to Planet America, we’ve been on a dodgy pirate ship, we’ve been through the plughole at the bottom of the universe. And now, to complete Doctor Who’s checklist of formats, it’s time for the one in the grimy industrial future. So yes, this is familiar ground in many ways, but whether it is Matthew Graham’s writing, or simply the swagger with which this series has been carrying itself, it is particularly satisfying. This is what last year’s disappointing Silurian story should have been.True, with so much buildup and exposition, it ends up feeling like not very much actually happens by the time groundwork is laid. There’s also a debate to be had as to whether, since it doesn’t feature any aliens, it qualifies as a proper Doctor Who at all. But on the parameters it sets itself, this is classy, stylish and nicely unsettling.Graham creates a believable world and workplace in that converted monastery, which you buy into from the opening credits. Raquel Cassidy’s deliciously brittle Cleaves, Marshall Lancaster’s Manc everydude Buzzer, and Sarah Smart’s mouse-that-roared Jennifer are well-drawn. And most promisingly of all, while second parts tend to look limp compared to first episodes, here’s a story where it’s the other way round. “I’ve got to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose! I never thought I’d have to say that again.”The episode opens with an extended clip of Supermassive Black Hole by Muse, and as Matt Bellamy and co’s sex-funk-rock-jam swaggers in, we’re straight back into Tardis housekeeping. These extended soapy sequences could have turned out, well, soapy – but seeing them play darts, listening to prog rock as the Doctor continues to surreptitiously scan Amy’s uterus just serves to lend credibility to what on paper is a ridiculous scenario. They may be having a laugh, but we also get a sense that the arc is really starting to go somewhere. Fear FactorThe Gangers are, at heart, a more psychologically disturbing creation, and The Rebel Flesh’s questions of identity and spirit and “who is the real monster?” are bound to invite comparisons with Battlestar Galactica and the Cylons. But when they do bring out the sparing CGI, it reaffirms the renewed horror quotient we’re getting this year. Mysteries and QuestionsThe obvious assumption here is that with a Ganger Doctor now running round, we have an easy and obvious get-out for the Doctor’s death. But wouldn’t that be too easy and obvious? And of course it assumes that both Doctors are going to survive next week’s episode. Elsewhere The Doctor refers to The Flesh as “primitive technology.” So what else does he know about it and what will it be turning into?Meanwhile, something intriguing has come to our attention. Deep within the bowels of the BBC website you’ll find this video of the Doctor in some distress. Its title, Analysis Lessons, is an anagram of Lonely Assassins. And Lonely Assassins was of course a name for … the Weeping Angels. Could they be this year’s real Big Bad? Time-space Debris• The Doctor chastises Amy for the suggestion they have arrived by accident. Is that a reference to last week and the Tardis taking him “where he needs to go,” or is he up to something.• Rory: “My Mum’s a huge fan of Dusty Springfield.”Doctor: “Who isn’t?”Actually, I’m not sure that I have ever met anyone who doesn’t like Dusty Springfield either.• Eyepatch Lady is back after her week off. Are we all agreed she’s the midwife?• Are we to assume that Jennifer is going to lead Rory down the path of temptation? He wouldn’t, would he?• I’m not sure how I feel about The Doctor’s “northern” jibes. Was I the only one who felt a little offended?• Matthew Graham’s only other contribution to Doctor Who is the best-forgotten Fear Her from 2006. Legend has it – although we don’t know whether it is true or not – that when Stephen Fry’s script finally proved unworkable, Russell T Davies asked Graham to come up with something in two weeks and with buttons for a budget. Next week!Something rather major happens. That’s all you’re getting. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogDoctor Who: The Rebel Flesh – Series 32, episode 5Related posts:Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised
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Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh – Series 32, episode 5
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May 21 2011, 4:56pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
MasterChef: have things gone stale?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/14/masterchef-have-things-gone-stale
Masterchef is no longer very interesting at all and there are also far too many cooking programmed and celebrity chefs on tv at present. Jamie Oliver’s dream school wasn’t exactly a success so I expect he’ll be back in the kitchen soon as well. Then there are all of the hybrid programmed that try to combine the most audience engaging aspects from across several genres. They never work very well either. Relocation cookery, gardening talent, animal casting and so on.
This article titled “MasterChef: have things gone stale?” was written by Vicky Frost, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 10.44 UTC Sometimes I wonder if I’m stuck in a kind of MasterChef vortex. First there was Loyd Grossman. Then there was John and Gregg bellowing and sucking their forks on BBC2. Next came the celebrities, the professionals and the juniors. Followed by the Australians, and their version of the UK show. And now? Now we’re apparently watching the UK version of the Australian version of the UK update of the Loyd Grossman original, on primetime BBC1. Who knows where it will all end? Or indeed who will still be watching? Because while previous incarnations of MasterChef might have been stuffed with ridiculous declarations, surplus rounds that appeared to have no bearing on the result, and more passion and determination than even Lord Sugar might think totally necessary, the show was rarely boring. This series, however, I’m finding it hard to summon up the energy to last a whole episode. The problems started with the auditions. John cried in one of them. Nobody cooked a playdafoo that looked like a child had made it unsupervised, wearing a blindfold, while having a tantrum. John and Gregg didn’t patrol the aisles rolling their eyes wildly and grimacing at anyone daring to experiment like they were actually going to be poisoned. Cocky competitors weren’t totally shamed in front of each other. Things haven’t really improved since. The set seems to have quadrupled in size so that the competitors could feasibly source entirely different sets of local ingredients, and the invention test box has morphed into a whole deli. Worse are the challenges. Fair dos to Gregg for trying to ramp up the tension of cooking for a circus on Peckham Rye – PECKHAM RYE! — or making a buffet for the cast of Merlin – THE CAST OF MERLIN! – or just some students – ERM STUDENTS! – but why aren’t the contestants doing more cooking in actual restaurants with actual chefs? That used to be most of the show, now it seems to be all field kitchens and mass catering. Things got a little better on last night’s show with the arrival of Michel Roux’s croque-en-bouche and a trolleyload of cakes – although it possibly wasn’t entirely wise to draw parallels between flying for the RAF and making some sodding sandwiches, Gregg – but I still feel that I’m seeing the series out to the bitter end, rather than actively enjoying it. Even old Toorude and Gregg the Egg appear to have changed their ways. I have heard not one metallic basil; merely a sprinkle of deep, velvety, iron-rich descriptions; absolutely no threats to de-robe and dive into a pudding. Only one proper, ridiculous moment has lodged in my brain: John doing some kind of uber-camp panto hiss of “Don’t bite off more than you can chew!” at Miss Swansea. Now that’s why I watch MasterChef. Instead we’ve had a few guest chefs to liven things up. But largely we’ve been meant to be caring about the contestants and their journeys and the challenges they’ve overcome. Sadly I haven’t, and I don’t. This year’s contestants are largely oddly unappealing – perhaps because they were whittled down to a final bunch astonishingly quickly. All I’m really interested in is their best two courses, which we get to see surprisingly infrequently. It seems strange, really, that MasterChef Australia, from which the new UK show borrows heavily, can combine many of the same elements and come up trumps. But then it also does everything the British show does, just 50 times bigger. So the judges are more flamboyant, more ridiculous; the contestants live in a house together and vote each other off; they have cook-offs against real chefs; they cater amazing weddings on boats. Against that background, setting the whole thing in a vast, sunlit warehouse feels vaguely reasonable. On BBC1, it doesn’t. So: how are you getting on? Are you looking forward to the final couple of weeks in a state of slight outrage after this blog? Or have you lost interest already? And can anyone explain why, when MasterChef was on seemingly every night for increasingly idiosyncratic lengths of time, we all moaned it was too much, but now we have it once a week for an hour, it seems it’s too little – even though it’s also completely boring? A quandry no?
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April 14 2011, 6:02am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The weekend’s TV: The Killing
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/the-weekends-tv-the-killing
No spoilers, just a pice to say that The Killing on BBC 4 has been the best thing on TV for ages.
This article titled “The weekend’s TV: The Killing” was written by Sam Wollaston, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 23.15 UTC Non-spoiler alert: there are no spoilers in what follows. If you’ve yet to see the end of The Killing, or any of it and you plan to, it’s still fine to read on. Honest. I need to explain something about the mechanics of this column. Unless there’s some massive live TV event on Saturday I file copy for Monday’s edition, the weekend’s television, on a Friday. The early deadlines are to allow people who work on the print edition, the newspaper, to have some kind of a weekend. I don’t know whether they deserve one, but that’s another matter. The point is, I’m not going to discuss who it was whodunnit in The Killing (BBC4, Saturday), the conclusion of which was obviously the Big Thing this weekend. It wouldn’t be fair on my editors and subeditors. For those of them (loads, this is prime Guardian territory) who have been watching, it would totally spoil their weekend. For the others, it would spoil the box set which I will be urging them to get hold of as soon as it comes out. If you do want to discuss how Pernille could possibly have slaughtered her own daughter (oops . . . only kidding, hahaha), then you need to go to Vicky Frost’s excellent series blog. Which you almost certainly have done already – more than 1,200 posts after the last one. And there are half a million viewers of the show – not bad for an obscure foreign-language drama on BBC4 that requires serious commitment. And after all that hype, who’s talking about Boardwalk Empire? I will say, however, that the end of The Killing has left a frightening gaping void in my life. What is there to think about now, to lie awake worrying about at night? (I had a nice little theory about Nordic neo-Nazism, Mayor Bremer, and the bid for the 1984 Winter Olympics on the go). In my house, The Killing – or Forbrydelsen, as we’ve come to call it, pretentiously – has crept up and engulfed us like the gloom of an unlit Copenhagen cellar in November. Not only has it been pretty much the only topic of conversation for the past 10 weeks, but we’ve also begun speaking in Danish. Pass the salt, tak; shall we get a hund? We’ll call out “Troels!” in the voice of Rie Skovgaard for no reason at all, often in our sleep. And then think of excuses to say it again. Who are ugly and live under bridges? “Troels!” How does the fisherman catch mackerel behind his boat? “Troels!” What does a bobby on the beat do? He pa-”Troels!” Shut up! I’ve also asked my girlfriend to dress up in a loose-knit white Scando sweater and walk about in the dark with a torch, saying nothing, stony faced, giving nothing away . . . anyway, sorry, perhaps you don’t need to know about that. The reason for the obsession is simple: The Killing is brilliant, the best thing on television for yonks. It started with the brutal murder of a teenager, then dragged us along for 20 hours, mainly in the dark (sometimes with a torch, sometimes without), up side paths and cul-de-sacs, doubling back on itself until it eventually reached its conclusion, leaving us exhausted. And emotionally drained too, because The Killing isn’t just a thrilling whodunnit, it’s a very human story that never lets you forget there’s a tragic death at its heart. It has some of the most interesting and real characters on television, who develop and react to the drama as it unfolds. I’m talking about Pernille and Theis Birk Larsen, Hartmann (“Troels!”), Bremer, Meyer. And Sarah Lund, of course, possibly the most single-minded detective in TV history, but also seriously fallible and therefore believable, and now officially the coolest woman in the world. A mesmerising performance by Sofie Gråbøl, by all of them. The Killing is also beautifully written and directed, deeply atmospheric and fantastic to look at once you get used to the dark. Eat plenty of carrots if you’ve yet to get involved. Which you must do. I do still have a few questions – mainly about Danish police procedure, but also about some of the political stuff and who knew what when. So conversation isn’t totally dead yet. Or maybe I’ll go back and revisit earlier episodes. I really think you could, already, and get more out of it; there’s not a lot of television you can say that about. The final body count is six, or seven if you count the earlier one. My final score is clearer, and higher. Ten. Out of 10.
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March 26 2011, 7:05pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/douglas-adamss-doctor-who-story-to-be-novelised
The lost Doctor Who episodes serial by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams will be published sometime in March 2012
This article titled “Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised” was written by Benedicte Page, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 14.58 UTC A novelisation of the “lost” Doctor Who serial Shada, scripted by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams in 1979, will be published next year. Adams wrote three series of Doctor Who in the late 1970s, when he was in his twenties and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first airing as a BBC radio comedy. Shada was intended as a six-part drama to finish off the 17th season, with Tom Baker in the role of the Doctor. The story features the Time Lord coming to Earth with assistant Romana (Lalla Ward) to visit Professor Chronotis, who has absconded from Gallifrey, the Doctor’s home planet, and now lives quietly at Cambridge college St Cedd’s. (The Doctor: “When I was on the river I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn’t you, Romana?” Professor Chronotis: “Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect.”) Chronotis has brought with him the most powerful book in the universe, The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey – which, in a typical touch of Adams bathos, turns out to have been borrowed from his study by a student. Evil scientist Skagra, an escapee from prison planet Shada, is on its trail. Large parts of the story had already been filmed on location in Cambridge before industrial action at the BBC brought production to a halt. The drama was never finished, and in the summer of 1980 Shada was abandoned – although various later projects attempted to resurrect it. Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who series are among the very few which have never been novelised, reportedly because the author wanted to do them himself but was always too busy. Gareth Roberts, a prolific Doctor Who scriptwriter, has now been given the job. Publisher BBC Books declared the book “a holy grail” for Time Lord fans. Editorial director Albert De Petrillo said: “Douglas Adams’s serials for Doctor Who are considered by many to be some of the best the show has ever produced. Shada is a funny, scary, surprising and utterly terrific story, and we’re thrilled to be publishing the first fully realised version of this Doctor Who adventure as Douglas originally conceived it.” Ed Victor, the literary agent representing the Douglas Adams estate, said: “The BBC have been asking us for years [to allow a novelisation of Shada] and the estate finally said, ‘Why not?’” Having Roberts novelise the Adams script was “like having a sketch on a canvas by Rubens, and now the studio of Rubens is completing it,” he added. The book will be published in March 2012 as a £16.99 hardback. Adams died in 2001, and a posthumous collection of his work, including the unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt, was published the following year. A Hitchhiker’s Guide followup, And Another Thing…., written by Eoin Colfer, was published in 2010, but Victor said there were “no plans at the moment” for more such sequels.
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March 24 2011, 10:15am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The Only Way Is Essex: beyond trash TV
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/21/the-only-way-is-essex-beyond-trash-tv
It’s like watching an old Open University programme on Advanced Pointlessness.
This article titled “The Only Way Is Essex: beyond trash TV” was written by Stuart Heritage, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 21st March 2011 12.05 UTC Some of you may have been looking forward to the return of The Only Way is Essex last night. You may have greeted the cast like old friends, cheering at the likes of Amy and Mark with joy and wild abandon. You may have even bought the official The Only Way Is Essex single and played it on a loop all weekend, bobbing up and down and intermittently chortling at the word “vajazzle”. Because, make no mistake, The Only Way Is Essex is a phenomenon. The stars have become tabloid staples. The official The Only Way Is Essex Facebook page has close to 200,000 fans – almost 50 times the number that Question Time has. Last night’s episode was so highly anticipated that ITV2 prefaced it with an hour of highlights and a shriekingly awful music video. People seem to genuinely love The Only Way Is Essex. But here’s a confession: I’m not one of those people. It’s not that I object to the trashiness of The Only Way Is Essex. I love trash. I devour it to the extent that I’ve got My Dog Ate What? – a show about dogs that eat unusual things – on series link. It’s more that I just don’t understand it. Put me in front of The Only Way Is Essex and I turn into your gran trying to programme a VCR. It’s embarrassing. Perhaps the most off-putting aspect of the show is its staginess. Not so much its much-discussed lack of fly-on-the-wall realism, but everyone’s uncomfortably stilted delivery. All the conversations on The Only Way Is Essex are full of weird little pauses, as if they’re all communicating via a faulty 1970s satellite link-up. It’s like watching an old Open University programme on Advanced Pointlessness. I’m also slightly hamstrung by the fact that I don’t understand anything that anyone says. Maybe there’s an inexplicably heavy tax on hard consonants in Essex and that’s the reason people say “arrrra?” instead of “hello” and “shaaaaaap” instead of “be quiet”. At one point last series a character said “naaaloooor” and it took me about five minutes to work out that they meant “nightclub.” Between this and the pauses, The Only Way Is Essex comes off like a nightmarish Teletubbies update starring several flourescent Bratz dolls (vajazzled, of course). Last night’s episode didn’t help matters. Narratively speaking it had a structure that was somewhere between scattershot and nonexistent. A couple got lost in the woods, an old lady went swimming, a Playboy model got a spray tan, a boy legitimately decided that he wanted to be known as Joey Essex, a woman asked where south London was and a pig urinated on the floor and then started drinking it. In fact I’ve made it sound much more exciting than it actually was. Nothing was captivating enough to make you want to tune in for a second 45 minutes, unless you harbour an inexplicable fascination with incontinent pigs. If things keep up at this rate, I’ll be no closer to understanding the show than I was during the first series. So if you watched and enjoyed The Only Way Is Essex last night, then please explain it to me. Am I supposed to be rooting for these people? Or does the pleasure come from judging them? Is it supposed to be good, or do people watch it because it’s terrible? And, if so, is it terrible by accident or design? Honestly, I’m so confused.
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March 21 2011, 10:11am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/24/can-scandinavian-crime-fiction-teach-socialism
I don’t know if it teaches anything at all, but DI Lund and co do make compulsive viewing over 20 episodes shown in ten weeks on BBC 4. Great stuff.
This article titled “Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th February 2011 09.00 UTC Who killed Nanna Birk Larsen? The question grips the relatively small, but avid, band of people who are following The Killing, a Danish crime series being screened on BBC4. The Killing throws up plenty of other questions, too. One even feels a strange tug of interest in Copenhagen’s local political scene because the abduction, rape, torture and murder of a 19-year-old student seems inextricably linked to a number of people fighting a city election. Alliances between various political parties ebb and flow, as the turns of the plot hurl suspicion at different candidates. One of the many things The Killing asks is this: are political coalitions really healthy? It is no doubt coincidence that the query is so particularly pertinent in Britain right now. But there is a definite reason why a slice of Scandinavian crime fiction should be actively concerned with framing socio-political debate. It is part of what is expected of the genre in this part of the world, and has been since Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö started publishing what came to be known as the Martin Beck series, in 1965. The couple, former journalists, conceived 10 crime novels that would provide a deliberate critique of what they viewed as the degeneration of Sweden. Marxists themselves, they intended to use the crime genre to illustrate the advantages of socialistic approaches to social problems. That sounds unbearably didactic and worthy. But the tremendous thing is that the books work first and foremost as crime fiction. In fact, they are reckoned by the cognoscenti to be among the finest and most influential crime novels ever written. Essentially, the pair challenged the convention of the lone genius private detective, replacing him with a group of police officers, led by the low-key Beck, who depended on each other to solve cases – and also, as a matter of course, put up with, or worked round, colleagues who were not so gifted. Maverick individualism was out, patient and humane people management was in. Thus, the ever-shifting group ploughed through many and varied crime scenes – crime scenes that usually in some way or other questioned the permissive values espoused by the liberal left so successfully at that time. It seems to me that in the pages of these Swedish police procedurals, all those years ago, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were examining contradictions that the British left even now refuses properly to acknowledge. The socialist left and the liberal left have little in common, with Blairism a shining example of how difficult it is to “triangulate” them. Hard work and compromise is needed before social freedom and state welfare can be shackled together. Even then, perhaps, the resulting beast is an impossible chimera. Is it too much to speculate that the current huge vogue for Scandinavian crime fiction is somehow a tacit acknowledgement of the need to have this debate, and the fear of what conclusions it might draw? Henning Mankell, in his Wallander series, now televised in two versions in Britain, makes no bones about the fact that he is continuing in the Martin Beck tradition. Stieg Larsson, who meant his phenomenally successful Millennium trilogy to be a 10-part work when he first started writing it, has succeeded in igniting exactly the sort of debate, among feminists anyway, that Sjöwall and Wahlöö expected. Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo, with 5m sales worldwide and film deals in the works, similarly uses sexual crime as an expression of the extremes of discord among men and women. This “metaphor” is somewhat unanswerable, on the face of it. But the details are quite controversial. The women who are killed in his novel The Snowman, for example, stand accused of denying men their paternal roles, and messing up their children in the process. Discuss that thesis in sexually and politically mixed company, and passions can run high quite fast. Nesbo is not a reactionary, despite the “traditional family values” cast that can be placed on his bestselling novel’s storyline. Like his peers and predecessors, he deals with problems inherent in social democracy, problems that are not that usefully divided between “left” and “right”. It is often said now that the two opposing terms have become “meaningless”, since both left and right contain a range of values from libertarian to authoritarian. In truth, the political tension is between freedom and regulation, often between whether the social realm should be regulated in order to benefit the economic realm, or the other way round. Social democracy, if it is about anything, surely, is about constantly striving to get that tricky balance right. The British are used to believing that the Scandinavians, especially the Swedes, have social democracy cracked, while Britain is far from being a socially democratic country. The truth, however, is much more nuanced. Britain shares many of the values and difficulties of the Scandinavian states, and of other European states that Britain tends to view as being much more socially democratic than we are. That was emphasised in a depressing report yesterday from risk analyst Maplecroft, which ranked Britain the 10th most likely country of 163 to undergo another economic crisis. Sweden is fourth, and Japan is the only non-European country to make it into the top 10, at nine. The shared challenges are “ageing populations, substantial levels of debt and high public spending on health and pensions”. Each of these, of course, is already high on the national agenda, the subject of raucous, sometimes hysterical debate. The logical solution – if there is a solution at all – is for everyone to live very healthy and disciplined lives, expecting to look after more vulnerable members of the family whenever necessary, and seeking only specialist or temporary help from a well-ordered state as a last resort. It is a vision that unites authoritarian left and right, but scares the bejesus out of free-marketeers and social liberals. All of these groups, however, can probably find something compelling in a chunk of Scandinavian crime fiction, which possibly owes its great popularity to its ability to offer sensationalist escape, but of a kind that is grounded all too recognisably in the real world.
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February 24 2011, 4:41am | Comments »
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