Wallander

[nineveh_uk]

The current (BBC4) series as Wallander is not as good as the first, primarily due to the absence of Linda, and to a lesser extent, Stefan. In real life, of course, Linda's absence is due to the decision not to recast the character after the original actress, Johanna Sällström, committed suicide in 2007. In the world of the series we don't yet know whether Linda' absence is due to a rift with her father (entirely plausible after the end of the last series, which made for a very downbeat new year's eve), a shift into a parallel universe in which the character doesn't exist, or if in fact everyone at the police station knows that she is dead and is carefully avoiding mentioning her, a theory perhaps lent plausibility by Kurt Wallander's penchant for black ties. Unless Swedish police officers habitually wear black ties.

But in the absence of Linda, we have Katarina Ahlsell. Superficially, she is obviously there to act as the main female character in the police station, which in common with most police dramas, most British police stations, and presumably most Swedish police stations, is male-dominated. But in observing Katarina in this role (competent professional woman - she may, though less than Kurt, have some run-of-the-mill domestic dramas, but there isn't a moment in which her professional skill is called into question), this series I have noticed something else, something that I now expect existed in the first series, but which I did not pick up on: the sheer number of women outside the police station. A substantial proportion of the minor roles that in an English-language programme would be held by men, in Wallander are held by women without remark. There's no snide comment from Morse, tacitly supported by the production, about there being a female judge, minister of state, hospital administrator or doctor, port officer, and so on. They are just there. And though I know that the position of women in employment in Sweden is not perfect, it is nonetheless pleasing to watch a mainstream* television programme that doesn't feel that one woman to five men is really quite enough, but reflects a society, or the ideal of a society, in which 1+1=2.

Now, can I persuade the BBC to buy 1990s Strisser på Samsø, which is basically a Danish "city cop moves to rural location, hilarity ensues", but in which the entire population of said rural location (an island) appears to have been cast to look every so slightly inbred.

*Because subtitled Scandinavian cop may not be mainstream here, but it is over there, sans subtitles.

Comments

[azdak.livejournal.com]

it is nonetheless pleasing to watch a mainstream* television programme that doesn't feel that one woman to five men is really quite enough, but reflects a society, or the ideal of a society, in which 1+1=2.


I gave up reading Cryptonomicon recently because, while it is in many respects exactly my sort of thing (Alan Turing! Spies! World War 2!), I couldn't get over my irritation that Stephenson apparently thinks women make up 0.01 per cent of the population. By the time we were two hundred pages in, out of a cast of thousands there had been only three named female characters, and two of those were there to be love interests.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

By the way, where in the Dower House would the Dowager offer Helen afternoon tea? Would a garden room be appropriate?

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

And Katarina Ahlsell also gets to be the love interest (and a lot more than the just the love interest) despite being 50, which here only happens if you're Helen Mirren and then people don't stop talking about it.

I've translated a couple of Swedish reports on gender equality recently and they are worried about not having fully achieved it, particularly in industry, but they're still way ahead of us. I was looking at this picture of the Swedish government (http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/577) the other day and my first thought was "what a lot of women". In fact it's 10 women and 12 men but I'm not used to seeing it.

I specifically looked to see who did the Wallander subtitles but it didn't say.