Richard Irvine-Brown of Motor Finance uncovers a fleet-based conspiracy from his couch.
There comes a time when every couple must admit they no longer care to sit in a pub, brave the cold or the heat, or generally care what their friends are doing (normally something displaying an enviable level of cash, like eating Waitrose food).
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The couple then becomes The Box-Set Watching Pair; two people shut away from the fearful pleasure of going out and resigned to caning away multiple hours of television in a room as dark as a skip, interspersed with incessant recap montages marked ‘previously on…’ which give the viewer the sensation they have been drinking for a long time without the memory of celebrating anything.
My wife and I are two such people and all five-and-a-half days of my festive break appear to have been spent slogging through 20 hours of Danish police series The Killing like marathon runners in a freezing bog.
We got it as a Christmas present from my mother to fill the void left after six seasons of The Sopranos. I think Dad was worried that, in our boredom, we might come over more often in the holidays and mooch his piccalilli and cashews. If you’ve not seen it, The Killing is 24 for alfalfa carrot eaters and Goths, or like a very long episode of Cracker without the temporary joy of watching him from Harry Potter going sparko.
Instead, we get Detective Sarah Lund, a woman with the constant expression of somebody reading a spreadsheet about the demise of woodland animals.
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By GlobalDataLurching from dead end to cliffhanger, Lund is essentially playing Guess Who? in a parade of dark settings that make the middle of the North Sea look like a relatively cheery place to visit.
The series adds a comparatively sexy subplot about townhall politics which says more about the comparative unsexiness of the main plot and makes later episodes feel like they were made for Ibsen-reading bureauperverts.
If your soul isn’t frostbitten by episode twelfty, so growl the shows cheerleaders, you’re obviously not concentrating on enough levels.
However, what no commentators on the show seemed to have noticed is the wider car-leasing conspiracy going on.
The murder victim of the series is found in the boot of a Ford (didn’t catch the model, it was dark) from a fleet hired by the Danish Liberal Party’s Copenhagen group. I kid you not: this is the heart-pounding kick-off to the series. By this point in 24, Jack Bauer would have died twice and eaten a helicopter while crying tears in the shape of tiny bald eagles.
Three things (which I acknowledge maybe only I care about) are never resolved from this point:
One: what is Ford’s Nordic operation doing about this? There’s the trademark blue oval flashed across the TV and print news, in the same blink of an eye as a dead schoolgirl. This must be stomping all over Danish retail figures.
Two: As it turns out, in the first of a tide of red herrings, one of the fleet’s drivers turns out to be a convicted walking sex horror with the absence of mind to leave his keys in the ignition of a car parked outside a school disco while he wobbles to hospital for his "medicine".
Chances are, with 18 cars leased to a political body, a fleet management company must have been involved. What are they doing to review their hiring policy? Apparently, nothing more than continuing to pick staff from a JG Ballard novel.
Three: What is the agreed RV on the fleet? What’s the VT arrangement on a nearly-new estate that’s spent two days in a canal with a dying woman scraping at the sculpting of its expansive boot? (In a cutaway typical of the show, we get a flash of her claw marks in the plastic, alongside the draining brown water and we’re left to make our own minds up about the state of the rest of the upholstery or clutch performance.)
Now, in a cop show that strives for authenticity so strong you could smell it (I recommend filling a rubber boot with moss and cigarette ends in your lounge to up the sense of misery), at least two of those ends are left loose.
Why? What’s anybody got to hide about fleet? Well, from the looks of the Copenhagen Police, the majority of its constabulary are also driving unmarked Fords.
There’s even a gratuitous wheel-level shot in episode number [I-lose-count] of two Fords pulled bumper-to-bumper by the curb at angles that suggests Danish cops have watched too many Michael Bay movies to care about traffic flow.
Then there’s the removal company operated by the dead woman’s family, who we follow in all their bristling nausea in case you’d forgotten that murder is an unhappy thing, which consists of at least two short wheelbase vans under 3.5 tonnes looking like Transits and another, smaller van that could well be a Transit Connect.
Yet at no point does anybody even mention the make, model or ownership of any of these vehicles.
What aren’t we being told?
Why don’t we even see a Mercedes, driven by a vengeful soldier, or a Volkswagen, driven by a crazy soldier, until series two?
Who is really pulling the strings here and what deal are they getting on their leased fleet?
How many scenes in this thing take place in cars?
The answer to at least the last question is: A Lot.
This show may have been the watershed moment for cars being marketed as coming with integrated Bluetooth.
Sure, for variety from the office, a car is a neat space to set a conversation scene but, past a certain level, detectives talking into ear pieces glowing like miniature Tron bikes stop looking like slick futuro-cops and more like maniacs compelled only to talk to other people with Lego stuck to their heads.
If anything will date The Killing, it won’t be the flat screen TVs, chic knitwear or the historically low monthly interest rates.
