Out of kilter

Can a critic simply be wrong, in the way that a mathematician who said that 3×3=10 would be wrong? I’m beginning to wonder, since I am the only person I’ve read who thought Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short was not vile but terrific and The Killing II (BBC4, Saturday) all right, though far from the work of genius others believe.

I never quite caught the first series of The Killing on BBC4, though I have tried. I do have the box set, and one day I might even watch it. Mind you, suspicions were aroused when the main talking point seemed to be the heroine’s knitwear. ‘Say what you like about the plot moving like an arthritic snail, but that Faroe Islands sweater really caught the eye!’ Sarah Lund, the Danish detective, seems clever and dogged, but not what you’d call interesting, unlike Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison, or any Jane Marple.