The Shetland Islands

As much as I like obituaries I also like those British detectives miniseries on BritBox and PBS.

Up to a few weeks ago, I relied on PBS to deliver these episodes of Prime Suspect, Morse, Endeavour, DCI Banks and Ridley. I disdain the American cop shows like Law and Order and anything NCIS with their badge-on-the-belt-babes and their trite sassy dialog. Give me a cerebral DI or DCI detective anytime. Plus, there's the scenery.

I get Amazon Prime through my daughter's membership, and sometimes find something on their Prime Video, but I was always blocked from some selections due to not having a BritBox subscription. So, I've finally caved in and went for it; $7.99 a month doesn't seem like too much to add to the pile devoted to media and entertainment. It's infectious.

My Australian Twitter buddy campaigns for written correspondence. Jen King (@justjenking) collects post cards and postage form around the world. as such, she finds the Australian mail boxes quite interesting. And I do too.

She posts images of them as she travels around the country. It's a big country with strong regional characteristics. And the mail boxes reflect that. These pictured are from Western Australia.

Ms. King once posted a Tweet about mail boxes with knitted caps, which seems to be a thing they do in Australia and the U.K. The WSJ did an A-Hed piece on this practice. The mail box toppers make them colorful, for sure. I just wonder what a lot of rain does to them. Probably gives some women an excuse to knit more of them.

My new found Brit cop is Jimmy Perez in Lerwick, Shetland Island, Scotland. Perez in Scotland? In an early episode Jimmy (everyone calls him Jimmy) tells someone that when the Spanish Armada cracked up centuries ago there were Spanish people who settled on the islands. Thus. the surname.

Shetland is an archipelago of 100 islands in the North Sea, significantly north of Scotland, but considered  part of Scotland while being closer to Norway. Apparently there are only 16 of the island s that can claim anyone living on them. There are a lot of sheep in this place. Norse customs predominate the culture of the Islands, but the accent is pure Scottish.

Jimmy is a DI, detective inspector, seemingly the one in charge of the Lerwick police department. Lerwick is the biggest city in Shetland and sits on what they call the mainland, even though it's an island. Reporting to him is a DS, detective sergeant, a DC, detective constable, and the desk sergeant, Billy. 

Jimmy's boss seems to be the Fiscal, the in-house prosecutor who occupies space in the police building. Fiscal apparently in Scotland is like the DA, so to speak, who supervises investigations to make sure they're going to produce a good case in court.

Jimmy is played by Douglas Henshall, the island conscience. He's Gary Cooper in High Noon. Laconic, but fair. The one thing about tapping into these miniseries so late in their existence is that I've walked into seven seasons of Shetland. I've been significantly binging so much that I feel I've mentally acquired a Scottish accent.

Note:
I wrote the reference to High Noon before getting to the part in Season 7 when one of the characters having a late night drink with Jimmy sizes him up and says he reminds him of the sheriff in High Noon, Jimmy Stewart.

Jimmy listens intently, then tells the fellow that it was Gary Cooper in High Noon. I was chuffed.

Aye, ach, peerie, grand, wee, bairn are all words and expressions heard often. The series is based on books by Ann Cleeves, who is also the creator of Vera, another popular Brit cop, a DCI (detective chief inspector) who has a larger staff in the Northumberland and Northumberland City police and no apparent boss in England.

Since Northumberland is in the north of England some Scottish seems to seep into the vocabulary. Vera, a stout woman who might be a U.K. version of Peter Falk's Columbo wearing a rain coat and slouch hat, who favors words like "love" and "pet" is played by Brenda Bleythen.  She is not married, so there is little family drama coming from her end. Vera is so popular it is in its 12th season. Shetland has 7 seasons so far, and I've binged through 6 already and am part way through the last season.

Jimmy doesn't flash or wear a badge. Occasionally he flips out the badge and warrant card, but often just introduces himself as "Detective Inspector, Jimmy Perez." I've never seen an episode where someone want to see id.

And of course the U.K. police don't carry guns, There can be armed police, and you see some of it in Vera, but not in Shetland. I love it when they take a small battering ram and take out the front door. Makes you wonder why you bother with locks.

Jimmy's wife died. This of course lets the plot lines give him some female company. But it usually doesn't develop into any permanence since Jimmy holds a lot in and sometimes winds up suspecting the woman of being part of the crime. This doesn't turn out to be case, but they feel wounded, and don't appear again in the next season. Jimmy gets the girl now and then, but he doesn't get to keep her.

Jimmy has a young adult daughter who is really his step-child since the woman Jimmy married had the daughter with another man, who is somewhat Jimmy's sidekick, Duncan Hunter, played by Mark Bonnar. Duncan is in every season, but often in trouble. He's Cassie's biological dad, and Jimmy is the one raising Cassie, who goes off to "Uni" in Glasgow eventually. Cassie like to tell everyone that she's got two dads who love her.

The Brits always have great casting. Shetland is populated with its share of freckle-faced, red headed adults and children. The opening theme is a mournful violin playing a Scottish sounding dirge.

The varied setting for these Brit crime series gives them great appeal. There is a view of Northumberland City in Vera that shows the bridge that is a double for the Sydney Harbor bridge and the Amtrak railroad bridge in Astoria, New York, that brings trains from New England and upstate New York into Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.

Shetland is something else from a scenery point of view. Few trees, brown hills. Even the grass looks a bit brown. The whole place looks like an Andrew Wyeth paining.

Nearly every scene features water. If you don't have water view in Shetland you're living in a cargo container. The building pictured to the right is Jimmy's home. On the water, of course. Keeping the crackers fresh in that place has got to be tough.

That's pretty much what every place in Lerwick looks like. Stone, stone, stone. Everything is a small castle.

Jimmy's favored clothing is jeans, colorless shirt, a sweater and a pea coat. He's got a tie on at the funeral for his mother. He's from Fair Isle, one of the many Shetland islands, a dot of land at the southern end of the archchipelago, home to 70 people and lots and lots of sheep. Fair Isle is also known for a great spot to watch bird migrations. That is if you're thinking of going.

Everything in Shetland is connected by ferries, big and small, small planes and short runways. It is a rugged looking place and leads you to understand why the Scots invented golf. They needed something to get themselves outdoors, because if you go by looks, you'd stay under the covers your whole life.

Jimmy and his team of course solve crimes. His sergeant is "Tosh," the nickname for Alison Macintosh, a young woman who looks more like a kindergarten teacher than a cop. But of course she's good. And she's not a badge-on-a-belt babe.

Jimmy gets results through forensics of course, and also through his stare, his 1000 yard blue-eyed stare that gets more people to blab up their guilt than you can believe. It save a lot of time and of course insures a good case for the Fiscal.

That Fiscal thing is really something different. The word apparently comes from Latin of course, fiscus, treasury. In some countries, like the U.K., the Fiscal is also the local prosecutor, and in Jimmy's case it's a woman who sits in an office at the municipal building at a desk in front of a lot of law books. The municipal building of Lerwick, holding the police station as well, is seen at the left. Everything looks like a dungeon.

Aside form all the differences in Brit cops and U.S. cops, and the stunning scenery, are some truly unique structures in that scenery that make the place so outstanding. 

One of the episodes takes the team to Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland islands. Not in a scene but what you can get when you Google Unst is the famous bus shelter. The what? Yep, a tourist highlight is a look at Bobby's Bus Shelter, outfitted with a sofa, lamp and TV. 

Turns out some kid named Bobby rode his bike to the shelter to get the school bus and somehow they outfitted the place in his honor as a mini motel room. I kid you out.

But I think the best takeaway from all these BritBox cop episodes a cake box in Aith, Shetland.

That's right, on the shore road in Aith, with the sea on one side is a cake box refrigerator (Cake Box Fridge) that you can take cakes, pies and cupcakes from and pay for on the honor system.

It reminds me of the time on a dark day from Saratoga racing my friend and I took a side trip to Cambridge, NY where the nuns of New Skeet make some of the best cheese cake and fruit cake you'll ever have. 

In the vestibule which you can enter without a key, is a refrigerator filled with their famous cheese cakes, normally distributed through their website or Hannaford Supermarkets. You can take something and leave the money in the off hours. I kid you not.

A Brit cop beats a badge-on-the belt cop any day.

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