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BBC Shetland Series - Ann Cleeves novels filmed in Shetland


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Heavens above folks, are you unable to differentiate between fictitious drama and reality? Of course its a bit disconcerting, and highly amusing, to see the way the whole thing is edited together....

 

Does being disconcerted and amused by it not preclude it from being a "drama" in any meaningful way though? You're either being "entertained" by each bit of unintentional humour that comes along, or by the plot, as if you try to mix the two, neither really works.

 

Yeah, its good for throwing a number of gratuitous local scenery shots in to folk's faces nationwide, but as for "drama" and "believability" 'Edge of the World' did the same job only much better nearly 80 years ago, and only using B&W.

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Heavens above folks, are you unable to differentiate between fictitious drama and reality? Of course its a bit disconcerting, and highly amusing, to see the way the whole thing is edited together....

 

Does being disconcerted and amused by it not preclude it from being a "drama" in any meaningful way though? You're either being "entertained" by each bit of unintentional humour that comes along, or by the plot, as if you try to mix the two, neither really works.

 

Yeah, its good for throwing a number of gratuitous local scenery shots in to folk's faces nationwide, but as for "drama" and "believability" 'Edge of the World' did the same job only much better nearly 80 years ago, and only using B&W.

 

Get a grip man, you're clearly engaging in an astonishing level of introspection if you can't understand how a drama is created. Its got nothing to do with the reality of either place or character.   

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The Bill was set in East London.  The police station didn't exist.  Yet even they managed when visiting places in East London to actually refer to the place names correctly.  They even had a No. 25 bus in the opening shots which was filmed in East London and does run in East London.

 

The series Shetland, on the other hand, is a mess.  They can't even shoot on the same bit of sand and any idiot could fathom that they had filmed one shot several metres away and seconds later, despite supposedly not moving, the actors had moved further along the beach!  They couldn't shoot different scenes in the police station in Episode 1 without the clock displaying the same time, yet those scenes are meant to convince the viewer those parts of the story line took part at different times!

 

The acting was absolutely dreadful:  wooden and boring.

 

TV dramas which win awards tend to pay attention to detail in order to have some credibility, the series Shetland, on the other hand, doesn't.

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Get a grip man, you're clearly engaging in an astonishing level of introspection if you can't understand how a drama is created. Its got nothing to do with the reality of either place or character.   

 

You're ignoring the point I was making using 'Edge of the World'. Fictional stories either need to use fictional placenames, or real ones used reasonably accurately, or the story falls over.

 

To those who don't know, it matters none what name a place is known by in a fictional story as long as it sounds believable, so why bother misusing actual names at all? And to those who do know the real names featured that are being improperly used, its just insulting and patronising. The whole exercise has no positives.

 

It smacks of the writers trying to be "clever" and "authentic" by creaming a few placenames off a map and throwing them around the script randomly, which comes off as being  stupid and arrogant.

 

Fact/fiction is a controversial genre anyway, and it takes a decent writer to make a half decent job of it. They didn't. We got what we paid for, a dime novel, turned in to low grade couch potato fodder.

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Did you also notice in the closing credits 'All places and locations are fictitious'?

 

 

Presumably there's a similar statement in the credits saying that all the accents are fictitious? Once you ignore the accents, the locations and the storyline it's not bad....hang on, what does that leave...

 

I do actually quite like it, I do think it could be more realistic, but the camera work is excellent and as always any publicity is good.

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hello, look on it as your own detective investigation and see how many more you can see in the coming weeks, it will add another interest to it.

 

Don't think I'll be bothering, episode #1 was uninspiring, and #2 definitely plodded unless for when they crammed all of it that was worth much in to the last five minutes.

 

Great, that some folk like it, and lets hope that's replicated nationwide with a positive knock on effect for Shetland, but Taggart its no, and that wasn't even all that brilliant.

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Having now watched Episode 1, I'd say if we're to p*ss and whinge about accuracy, I'd be more interested to hear them substantiate the line about sniffer dogs driving people from cannabis to heroin. That seems rather more contentious than whether St Ninian's is a beach or sand or up or down. 

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