As people steeped in the dark culture of our troubled little Dunedin, local television viewers are surely at one with the frozen darkness of the Scandinavians and their difficult crime dramas.
We feel so keenly the deeply troubled existence, for instance, of Wallander, the Swedish police detective who is actually Kenneth Branagh.
Wallander, of course, is the British version of the Swedish series adapted from the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels.
Generally, Wallander is troubled in a dark and cold way in the emotionally unsettled, windswept and frozen harshness of Sweden.
So it is a surprise when the latest series on Sky's UKTV opens with a 4WD emerging from a heat haze on melting tarseal on plains of parched grassland.
But it is not our eponymous hero driving the car, instead it is a Swedish national driving to an isolated rundown barn with a creepy looking concrete shed.
Sadly, the woman could not hear the disturbing music viewers will hear when they watch the first of three new Wallander stories from April 11.
She did, however, hear creaking doorways and strange banging sounds and should have done a very quick Swedish shuffle back into her car and fled.
But no.
Instead she ventures further into the creepy shed, only to discover an alarming scene of butchery and a gentleman with a meat cleaver and what appears to be bad intent.
What was she doing there?
Did she escape?
Where is she now?
Fortunately, Wallander is in the country, there for some sort of speech, and following the crime in the Cape Times.
Could he be drawn into the case of the missing Swedish national while attending a police conference in South Africa, and could he be about to embark on a physical and emotional journey that leads him from the aching beauty and open spaces of rural Africa to the intense poverty and deprivation of its urban townships?
Well that's what it says in the press release, so I'm guessing yes, he could.
Meanwhile on TV2's Shortland Street, as all sorts of relationships begin and end and life goes on in the wake of the Christmas siege and people act badly but always get their comeuppance in true and satisfying soap style, two new characters have arrived.
This is exciting.
New nurse Kate Nathan (Laurel Devenie) and her son Blue (Tash Keddy) have washed up in Ferndale.
What are they like?
Well, Kate is a very strong, direct, pragmatic person who polarises opinion wherever she goes.
Blue has a strong artistic, alternative side. When he lets people get close, they see that he's sweet and funny behind the walls he puts up.
Let the dramas begin.
- by Charles Loughrey
