SEEING IS BELIEVING

As my fictional namesake was fond of pointing out, we see but we don't observe.

So it is with a lot of telly. Whilst we can hardly be blamed for finding life outside the box far more distracting than what's going on inside it nowadays, it is rather astonishing how often people will be convinced they've seen one thing when something quite different is obviously true.

Even in an age when we can watch things over and over again to check things over, the memory still cheats and people will swear blind that they saw something other than what they actually saw, and  even when you show them that the truth is otherwise, they'll claim that it's been edited somehow and they know what they saw.

Once upon a very long ago, I had a friend who was utterly convinced that she saw the buttets entering the blood-splattered body of J.R. Ewing during one season finale of "Dallas" and nothing on earth would convince her that, alongside the rest of the world, she only saw the back of a chair being shot at followed by a dramatic slump.

Which brings us to "The Bridge 2" the latest in a selection of Scandinavian Detective Series which finished its ten episode run on BBC4 last weekend after five weeks of double-episode showings on Saturday evenings.

Knowing that we're really not very good at dealing with cliffhangers any more, we decided to record the whole lot and then blitz it during the final weekend which definitely helps you to keep up with all of the twists and turns of the convoluted plotting that fills these ten hour stories. I mean, Lewis or Barnaby would have had the whole thing wrapped up inside of two hours, but if you've got ten (or even twenty) hours in which to tell your story, you can allow things to go batshit crazy for an episode or three without having to resolve anything.

The series began with a recap of series one which was probably just as well given that, as it unfolded, we realised that we didn't remember a bloody thing about it despite having been utterly gripped by it all over one lost weekend sometime last year.

Then it weaved and twisted and turned, occasionally with some genuine "laugh out loud" moments (I know! Bet you didn't expect to hear that about a moody Scandinavian murder mystery drama, did you...?) along they way, usually from the interplay between our stars Sofia Helin as Saga Noren and Kim Bodnia as Martin Rohde, alongside the almost unbearable tragedy which unfolds.

Actually, given the resolution of the previous series, it was refreshing to see a more realistic approach being taken towards issues of vengeance, reconciliation and closure than is usually taken in such dramas, certainly in the American versions, where such solutions seem to come from the barrel of a gun which, in the real world, is seldom a good idea.

Which brings me to the point I made at the start of this today. If you've seen it you'll know this, but what we think we saw, what we actually saw, and what the producers wanted us to believe we saw during those final few minutes may indeed be three different things, and, when and if the series does return for a third run, perhaps what we think is true may not be true at all.

After all sometimes suicides do happen at inconveniently coincidental moments, sometimes a coffee cup is just a coffee cup, sometimes what people think they know and what people actually know are two completely different things, sometimes people intend to do different things with items they've acquired than we think they mean to, and sometimes people just need saving from themselves, something which can require drastic intervention to achieve.

Not that I'll remember any of this by the time I sit down to blitz the next run, of course.