Brooding detective with the Zen-like approach to life

Those of a certain vintage will remember a Dutch detective called Van der Valk, solving crimes around Amsterdam back in seventies; more recently Kenneth Brannagh starred as Wallander, the brooding Swedish investigator in this darkest of dramas – and now the BBC has added Aurelio Zen to the list of foreign crime fighters who ignore their European surroundings to carry on their business in perfect English.

Of course there would be little point in the BBC having Detective Zen speaking Italian for 90 minutes – hardly likely to attract a massive audience to the station at 9pm on a Sunday night – but it does allow them to show Rome in all of its cultural glory as the backdrop to another superb offering.

Zen is based on the novels of Michael Dibdin and he is brought to life superbly by the brooding Rufus Sewell, playing, it seems, the only honest detective in all of Rome.

That well of integrity could weigh heavily on a lesser man but Zen is too super cool for that; even his heavy smoking – he lights up as often as he breathes – cannot take from this brooding presence as he walks the thin line between playing politics and stooping to corruption in Berlusconi’s Italy.

Van der Valk might be a distant cousin of this genre – made for ITV, the best comparison would be the early Dr Who series and the current incarnation – but it allowed English channels to ignore the mother tongue of the detective’s country and just use the city as its backdrop.

Wallander was a straight remake of a Swedish series but, as the screening of the originals on BBC3 proved, Brannagh took it to new heights – and thankfully there is another series on the way.

Zen is on the same lines – one honest cop among a bunch of male Neanderthals in a department run on backhanders, favours and a determination not to add to the workload by rocking the boat.

Aurelio doesn’t appear to have too many friends at the department; he has a broken marriage and finds himself in his thirties living at home – albeit in a beautiful old apartment – with his mother.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.