Wallowing with Wallander

TV REVIEW: WallanderBBC1, Sunday, Louis Theroux: Law and Disorder in PhiladelphiaBBC2, Sunday, Britney: For the RecordSky 1, Monday, The Late Late Toy ShowSaturday, RTÉ1

'WE WANT to be known for more than just Abba and Björn Borg and skinny-dipping in mountain lakes," chuckled the fictional Swedish politician, a bloke who might have been a little less jolly and banal had he known that he was just about to have his complacent noggin sacrificially scalped by an axe-wielding teenager in war-paint.

The work of best-selling Swedish detective novelist Henning Mankell has come to the BBC in the appealing guise of three single dramas, featuring the Swede's psychically bruised, taciturn and unshaven hero, Kurt Wallander, rendered for television, down this end of the ice floe, by Kenneth Branagh.

I've become pretty well-disposed to your average misanthropic TV detective on chilly Sunday nights: there is something vaguely comforting about packing tomorrow's PE gear while some corpse is being hacked apart on the autopsy table, and crawling under the stairs for missing trainers while a weary, gum-chewing vice cop cracks another prostitution ring.

These brutal bedtime stories tend, however, to follow the well-trodden path of vulnerable young women quaking in basements, yards of sexual abuse, and great swathes of corrupt old cops and politicos housing their fading prowess in cruelty. And of course there's the maverick cop, usually contending with the bleakly recidivist nature of the human condition, a broken marriage and a dying, irascible old father. Wallander is, in all these respects, entirely unoriginal.

However, the programme is far superior to your average tag-'em-and-bag-'em diversion. One reason is that Branagh (whom I began to like again after his foppish, self-mocking turn as Gilderoy Lockhart in one of the Harry Potter films, a performance that read like an apology for previous bouts of actorly self-importance) has created an authentically intelligent, anxious and existentially battered hero.

The other star turn is the location. Shot in the author's home place, Ystad in southern Sweden, with its choppy navy-blue seas and sinister fields of cold yellow rape evoking the country's livery, it was refreshing to see the Polisen tearing around undulating vales of tentative spruce rather than the parched urban housing estates we are used to. Happily, there has been no attempt to relocate the story, no explanation offered (or needed) as to why a bunch of English actors are hanging out in pleasingly uncluttered wooden interiors and getting their lines out without using silly Swedish accents.

I suspect that Wallandermight be a different kettle of herring, though, if one was actually Swedish (I just checked in the mirror - I'm sooo not, unfortunately). Mankell's frequent references to the fallout from his country's "sexually liberated social experiment" was intriguing, if a little arch, and there was also a frustratingly flimsy reference to the unsolved assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in the 1980s, which still, unsurprisingly, blots its pale-wood psyche.

Wallander is superior escapism however, and this Scandinavian Morse could become as popular as the flat-pack, no assembling required.

FROM THE ICY, fjordic beauty of Ystad to the mean, mean streets of north Philadelphia was a hell of a televisual leap. Christ, the United States has one messy backyard for the new innkeeper to clean up. The ravaged streets of parts of northern Philadelphia look like some urban Hogarthian hell: shuddering clapboard houses; fretful, rusting ironwork; weary graffiti; stoops heavy with glassy-eyed, smacked-out youth, and somehow, even more depressingly, a forlorn goat and a dazed calf grazing on a patch of wasteland, being tended by an obese, dangerously sentimental, alleged drug lord called Red, who smiled benignly at his petrified menagerie, his inconsistent dentistry gleaming in the light of his $100,000 diamond-encrusted necklace.

Louis Theroux: Law and Disorder in Philadelphiasaw the return of the boyishly inquisitive journalist in the buttoned-down shirt and the awfully clever glasses as he embarked on the first of a two-part series, investigating the apparent breakdown of law and order, both in Philly and, next week, in a giant stride even for those lanky legs, in Johannesburg.

Theroux travelled (at speed) with the Philadelphia police, clutching at his nerve ends (and quite possibly his sphincter muscle) as the law enforcers whacked their cop cars into the kerb, smashing user after user, and skinny wild-eyed dealer after skinny wild-eyed dealer, down on to the sidewalk, cuffing 'em and removing their weapons of choice from the waistbands of their baggy pants.

"Everybody's a kerbside lawyer," said a taciturn and unsympathetic cop when Theroux appeared to become convinced by the spirited defence of one suspect as he lay spreadeagled on the frosting ground, complaining about police harassment.

Grimly fascinating as Theroux's investigation was (from his interview with one young heroin-addicted prostitute who needed a two-hourly fix and half a dozen clients in the same period to facilitate it, to the gloomy discovery of a frozen corpse in a crack house), there was little in his analysis that we haven't already heard (pervasive poverty, drugs, guns, broken families). Ross Kemp on Gangs, for example, has been engaged in a more muscular exploration of this smack-and-crack subculture for some time. Having dispensed with his "weird world", Theroux is obviously now in search of gravitas to weight his US odyssey, but despite his bravery and practised guilelessness, there is something unconvincing about his patrician spin on the merry-go-round. His measured curiosity cut no mustard on these cold streets.

THE OLD GREYHOUND bus didn't just stop in Philly this week. The next stop along the line was Britney: For the Record, a grievous attempt by the diva's public relations machine to rebrand the shattered teen icon, who has fallen rather spectacularly off her celebrity perch in recent times. In the improbable event that you are among an other-worldly elite who have remained cauterised from Spears's travails, let me fill you in. Where to start? Spears, pimped out to the Disney Channel before she could walk, later morphed into a teen star, made boppy records and strutted her stuff in music videos looking like some ageing executive's wet dream (virgin in an Ann Summers school uniform). She then got married, fat, pregnant, divorced, married, divorced, bald (she rather publicly shaved her hair off in February 2007), and went to lots of nightclubs with Paris Hilton but without her knickers (I'd have ditched Hilton and hung on to the knickers). Finally, she cracked up, got sectioned, lost custody of her kids - and now, at the ripe old age of 27, is making a comeback with a new single called Womanizer, which she mimes to, badly, while brandishing a whip in the middle of a three-ring circus. God, you couldn't make this stuff up.

Anyway, with barely disguised panic, the operation behind this forlorn girl decided to stick her in front of a camera and "reveal" the mind behind the madness, the lonely artist under the falsies. The script was predictable: "I lost my way, I lost focus, I lost myself" and, later, "all the lawyers, doctors and people analysing me . . . without them, I'd be free". If this bitter little slice of PR is anything to go by, the girl from Louisiana, in the Marilyn Monroe wig, who still swallows her daddy's "cheesy grits" (and all the other unpalatable claptrap that's thrown at her by her central-casting entourage), seems dolefully unaware of just how long and hard she's going to be flogged for every last cent by her management.

APPARENTLY, THE ENTIRE country pulled up their armchairs to see Pat in a cardie presenting the annual technological fiasco, The Late Late Toy Show. It may be appallingly churlish and unfestive to carp on about an event that so many people get into their best pyjamas for, but this year the batteries really did run a little low. The show was hijacked by a simperingly artificial Sarah Ferguson pushing her literary oeuvre, a truculent boy-band, and the less-than-charming team from Top Gear, who arrived at the end of the proceedings like a bevy of pungent Christmas uncles to pounce on the remote-control cars and total them against the skirting boards.

However, among the eager break dancers, the smart-alecks in well-tailored shirts, the busy robots and the defecating dollies were a handful of gentle children who sang or danced or played the squeeze-box. And of course there was Knitwear Pat bravely simulating avuncularity, though somehow you could still see the strings.

I truly hope that the eager "one for everyone" studio audience, who went home with a trunk full of handmade chocolates and DVDs and bilingual dollies, were all paediatric nurses and teachers and lollipop ladies and redundant classroom assistants. That thought would bring a bit of festive cheer.