Tv review: Sebastian Bergman | Hit & Miss | Harlots, Housewives And Heroines

Sebastian Bergman

BBC4, Saturday, 9pm

Hit & Miss

Sky Atlantic, Tuesday, 10pm

Harlots, Housewives And Heroines

BBC4, Tuesday, 10pm

To rub salted herring into Sweden’s wounds, The Killing was a bigger hit. Sweden said: Gimme gimme gimme (our gloomy crime genre back). Denmark said: Run out into the snow naked and beat yourselves with Ingmar Bergman DVDs. The compromise was a series set on the bridge linking the two countries, called The Bridge. But now Sweden have gone back to Rolf Lassgård.

Lassgård was the first Wallander, Nordic noir’s Pete Best who’s seen not one but two Ringos become more celebrated in the role: Kenneth Branagh and Krister Henriksson. As Sebastian Bergman he’s a criminal profiler, like our own Fitz in Cracker, and just as big and bear-like and shambling and familiar with the local pizza takeaway menu, and just as hopeless at relationships.

In Bergman’s case, not hopeless for the lack of trying. In fact he tried it on with just about everything in a skirt in the opening case. Right away he flirted with women in the audience at his book reading. He eyed up schoolgirls and women on trains and not even the murder victim’s mother was spared his grizzly charms – not even a teacher who was a key witness in the ongoing investigation. Bergman was after a comfort shag. He’s suffered tragedy in his own life, although at first you thought this might be him spinning a line. But eventually the story settled down to deliver the usual Nordic noir quota of violence, blood and associated horrors which never amounts to just a smorgasbord.

We must have been replayed the shooting of a teenage boy on a floodlit football field a dozen times. This was deemed necessary for every twist of the plot but by the end became really tough to watch. Still, I like Bergman’s relationship with the head of CID, another middle-aged man whose build and general melancholy suggest the nearest pizza-house being high up his “family and friends”. Oh, and don’t worry, our hero didn’t try it on with him.

I wouldn’t say I was hooked on Sebastian Bergman, more mildy intrigued, and that would sum up my attitude to Hit & Miss as well. The title is a bad pun. Chloë Sevigny is brilliant but doesn’t quite look right, strutting around the Lancashire countryside in Wonder Woman boots. There are lots of moments where Nothing Very Much Happens, Albeit Artfully. The junior members of the cast are a bit too mucky-kid-cute. And yet Paul Abbott’s drama definitely has something.

One thing it’s got is a willy, not in the usual place. Sevigny’s Mia steps into the shower after a hard day’s pumping lead into some poor sucker’s back and there it is. The big reveal is handled subtly, suggesting it’s no biggie that the hitman is really a hitman/woman. And now that I think about this some more, it’s not. Tom Cruise as a contract killer with grey hair in the film Collateral was more of a stretch for me than Sevigny with an appendage that isn’t a gun silencer. She’s a better actor, her Irish accent here is passable (Cruise’s for Far And Away made you view every pub in the Shamus O’Bogtrotter chain in a new and authentic light) and you’d never get Tom on the karaoke for one of Morrissey’s blousiest numbers. Actually, you probably would, but you get my point.

The big reveal for Mia in any case is that she’s a mum. A letter written by her ex just before the latter died named her as guardian to 11-year-old Ryan – oh, and could she look after these three other ragamuffins as well? The kids are adept at beheading chickens down on the farm but badly need parental guidance. As a father would, Mia teaches Ryan how to stand up to the bus-stop bully before sorting out the bully’s dad who’s secretly shagging Leoni, the least receptive to the transgender assassin now experiencing strange maternal urges. It’s complicated.

History, in Dr Lucy Worsley’s hands, is spiffing. In Harlots, Housewives And Heroines, TV’s favourite new posh pixie is our guide for a romp through the mid-1600s when a succession of women – who according to the court painter of the day all looked the same – won celebrity, wealth and influence by becoming the king’s mistresses. Charles II, acquiring 13, liked them wearing negligees designed to fall to the floor upon his arrival so the bold Lucy tried one for size. She stopped short of painting her nipples with cochineal but did call Samuel Pepys an “old perv”. Yes, life was a bit racier after the puritanism of “Cwomwell”. (Sorry, but we make fun of Jonathan Ross’s accent and this show’s about equality, right?). «