For those of you who are with me on the merits of Scandinavian/Nordic Noir, this is excellent:

Currently screening on NOWTV - and presumably SKY somewhere - it's about politics and energy supplies, Europe and Russia, friends who are enemies and probably most frightening of all, how smartphones have allowed people that normally wouldn't be allowed to own a fish to make themselves known to the world.

Standing between Norway and an avalanche of destruction is the man seen on the cover of the DVD here. So I guess it's kind of like an intelligent 24... only slower, better thought out and with subtitles. It also comes from the mind of Jo Nesbo and if you know Harry Hole, you know what you're in for.

Killer TV from every angle.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of those bored with the status quo.

I have a show to fire up over the weekend, but as soon as I'm back on dry land, the new Big Bear Rescue shirt goes up for sale and I'm really looking forward to this one. So much so, that I might buy two this time around. After a year of this, bear shirts is the only damn thing I'll have in the drawer.

Just a little reminder that this is what it's all about. It's not a good look for a bear.

Slight rewind... I hadn't finished on the subject of Noir.

New read this week is the latest instalment of Ragnar Jonasson's Dark Iceland series, Rupture. This is one deceptive series. It never seems as though anything has happened as you drive through the pages - then you come to an abrupt halt at the end only to find everything has happened. I like the guy very much...

Thus ends the propaganda machine for all things Nordic. Now I must write.

(It's a shame Welsh-Noir doesn't have quite the same ring about it. I can't remember if the BBC threw that description at Hinterland when it came out, but if they did, they should have thought much harder about it.)