Six months as a TV critic, and I’ve seen enough corpses to last a lifetime

It was Shetland that tipped me over the edge. Not the place, but the TV series. Although that’s set in the place. So both, really. It’s a crime drama, see, and people keep getting murdered. Roughly speaking, so far, there’s been a corpse every episode. Which by the end of the series will mean eight corpses. Which, given that there are only 20,000 people in Shetland, means that Scotland’s most northerly islands have a murder rate roughly comparable with that of Belize.

Or higher, even, because my calculations assume that a series happens in a year, and that we are seeing all the murders there are, rather than just the ones that Dougie Henshall gets called out to. Frankly, it makes the place seem terrifying. But then a lot of places are. According to the internet, Copenhagen only has 12 murders a year, although I think that must be a bit out of date because we had more than that in the second series of The Bridge.