BBC's Wallander: Sweden Seen Through British Eyes

'For national space to retain its power', Edensor writes, 'it must be domesticated, replicated in local contexts and be understood as part of everyday life'.15 Furthermore: 'These iconic, privileged landscapes are continually recirculated through popular culture The conversion from productive to tourist landscapes is telling in terms of the marketing of national identity and the way that increased mobility has renewed such locales as pilgrimage sites'.16 Edensor uses the film Braveheart to argue that landscape and narrative were used to construct a certain idea of Scottishness, and to demonstrate that the tourist industry and film production recycled a specific national imagery. John Caldwell (1995) criticises the very notion of a certain TV glance and discusses Ellis' work as part of a general 'myth of distraction',26 arguing: 'The morass-like flow of television may be difficult for the TV-viewer to wade through . . . but television rewards discrimination, style consciousness, and viewer loyalty in ways that counteract the clutter.'27 Considering that the DVD market and the internet are blurring the borders between film and TV as media, and that drama series and films are produced and distributed for screens of various sizes and for various mobile and immobile media and settings, it is necessary to rethink the way we conceive of not only TV and film but also the glance in contrast to the gaze. Significant recurrent settings are the police station, Wallander's home and his father's home; settings related to the plot of each episode cover places such as crime scenes (e.g. the local train station in 'The Fifth Woman' ("2:6) and the hospital in 'Firewall' (1:2)), private homes (e.g. Harderberg's home in 'The Man who Smiled'(2:5)) and public areas (e.g. the fair in 'Faceless Killers' (2:1)). [...]the landscape is imbued with an undefined 'magic', which is related to new digital camera technology, but also to the specific Nordic landscapes, which connote a sense of 'otherness': Philip Martin (director): The world of it feels simultaneously magical but also believable and very new.45 Tom Hiddleston ('Martinsson', seen with the beach in the background): Sweden is going to be such a distinct character of the story, I think, as much as, say, Oxford was in the Morse stories.