It looks like BBC 4 has uncovered another cult hit. ‘The Killing’ follows the police investigation of a murder over twenty days, one day per episode. It has a strong, believable, feisty heroine, a satisfying, complex plot, and excellent filming. We‘re going to have to work hard to keep up as BBC4 are cruelly showing it at the rate of two episodes a week. Oh, did I mention it’s in Danish?

‘Nordic Noir’, as it’s coming to be known, seems to be breaking down—finally—the British dislike of subtitling. The big popular breakthrough has of course been the three Swedish films of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, but even before that BBC4’s screening of the two Swedish series based on Henning Mankell’s character Kurt Wallander had won a substantial following, not least because the Swedish originals were so much better than the BBC’s own versions starring a theatrically moody Kenneth Branagh.

We’ve had to get used to the fact that the long British run of dominance in TV drama that ran, at least, from the original ‘Forsyte Saga’ and ‘Play for Today’ until ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and ‘The Boys from the Blackstuff’, had long since been taken over by American television. I can still remember the extraordinary thrill of watching the first episode of David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’—there had been nothing so bizarrely original on British TV since ‘The Prisoner’ 20 years earlier. Since then we’ve had ‘The West Wing’, ‘The Sopranos’, ‘The Wire’, and so much more—dense, rich, intelligent dramas that demand a huge commitment of time from the viewer.

Now it looks as if Scandinavian TV is seizing what little reputation British TV drama retained. Comparing the Swedish ‘Wallander’, or the Danish ‘The Killing’ to ‘Silent Witness’ or the recent dire adaptations of the Aurelio Zen novels, is like comparing Raymond Chandler to Mickey Spillane. But have the Nordic countries only now reached such heights, or is it just that in the English-speaking world we’ve been unaware of the riches available to audiences watching in those minority languages? After all, Ingmar Bergman’s two late masterpieces ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ and ‘Fanny and Alexander’ were originally made for TV before being edited for cinema release.

Of course, Continental Europe has a very different attitude to ‘foreign language’ films and TV programmes. Subtitling is rare. Dubbing is the norm. Indeed, in some countries it’s so much the norm that even native language productions are post-dubbed—that’s why so many Fellini films, for example, have such an odd disjunction between sound and vision: all the dialogue was dubbed in afterwards in a sound studio. Indeed so much foreign language material is dubbed that in some countries actors can make a very good living out of becoming expert in matching their speech to the lip movements of another language.

In Britain we remain—thankfully, in my view—wholly resistant to dubbing. But maybe, as a result, we’re missing out on some terrific foreign TV and films.

When we were staying in the Trastevere area of Rome many years ago we came across the only English-language cinema in the city—perhaps in all of Italy. I fear that, as far as I can tell from the Web, Cinema Pasquino has now closed . It existed primarily for the benefit of Italian English-language students, and with the advent of multi-language DVDs I suppose that particular need has gone. Visiting it was like a step back to the fleapits of my childhood in the 60s. The same rather greasy individual not only sold us our tickets but also reappeared at the Intermission, in a purple jacket several sizes too small, to sell ice creams from a tray. Ceiling tiles hung loose. The cueing numbers were projected (3-2-1)before the film proper. It was a comedy—Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan Murder Mystery’—and as the only native English speakers in the audience, it was distinctly odd to be the only ones laughing in advance of the subtitles.

That same year, 1994, I had an equally bizarre experience of extreme dubbing. I was teaching on an arts management course in Krakow, and on the TV in my hotel I was astounded to see ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ dubbed into Polish. Actually, ‘dubbed’ is a generous term: a single-voice narrator had simply been overlaid on the original English soundtrack, which was still distinctly audible underneath. I’ve asked Poles about this peculiar technique, and they tell me that, yes, the result was still very funny. Which probably says more about the originality of the Pythons than it does about the skills of the Polish narrator.

Of course, one reason why these subtitled Nordic programmes are so acceptable to British audiences may be that Swedes, in particular, tend to be slow-spoken and laconic. BBC4 has also shown two excellent film versions of Andrea Camilleri’s wonderful ‘Inspector Montalbano’ novels. But voluble Sicilians rattle off their Italian at a terrifying rate. Keeping up with the subtitles meant missing much of the wonderful Sicilian locations, never mind crucial elements of the plot.

This is an issue which can also affect the subtitling of Gaelic TV programmes. A few years ago BBC Alba made a superb series about Gaelic emigration. By visiting the descendants of the original emigrants on their home territories around the world, and celebrating their achievements, the series radically rethought attitudes to the Clearances. But the knowledgeable presenter was as loquacious as, say, Simon Schama, and it was hard work to keep up with the flow of fascinating knowledge. Which makes me wonder how a subtitled Schama comes across to non-English speakers. And of course BBC Alba is one area of British TV where, for children at least, dubbing is very much the norm. Padraig Post, anyone?