Any feeling of New Year blues was comprehensively wiped away on Sunday night as the careworn face of Kenneth Branagh arrived back on our screens as the BBC launched the second series of its sumptuous Wallander adaptations.
The first series was the television highlight of 2008, and as I wrote at the time, was a reminder to television audiences of just how good an actor Kenneth Branagh is, and that again was highlighted in last night's episode Faceless Killers.
Branagh's face was examined in quite microscopic detail by the camera as he suffered a series of agonies, from assessing the brutal slaying of an elderly couple in their remote farmhouse, to watching his father suffer progressive neurological breakdown to dealing with the aftermath of his own first fatal shooting incident. And what the microscope highlights is an actor of extraordinary skill who can portray the full range of human emotion within the confines of Wallander's own repressive nature. It is nothing short of an acting master class.
Such persistent use of the close-up is a clever device and offers the viewer the closest equivalent the screen can offer to the searching psychological analysis provided in a written narrative. It gives Wallander an intensity that never lets up, complementing a gripping plot that touches on the hidden personal secrets of seemingly ordinary people at the same time as emploring emotive public issues, such as attitudes to migrants.
In a series of preview interviews Branagh gave before Christmas, he spoke at length about the time and trouble that he and the cast and crew had gone to to familiariarize themselves both with the books and with Sweden - Branagh himself has been living in a rented house in Ystad, Wallander's home town, which is a relatively small community on Sweden's rural south coast.
The effort paid off. Wallander has a stark, introspective Nordic feel to it - you know you are not watching a cliched detective crashing round Leeds or London. And, as in the first series, the cinematographer is a serious rival to Branagh for star of the show. Faceless Killers was quite beautifully shot, making full use of the vast and empty Swedish sky to frame and contextualize the labours of the protagonists.
If you need reassurance that British television drama is not yet dead, or if you simply want to watch a high class detective drama, the first episode is available at iPlayer, the rest of the series can be caught on Sundays at 9pm on BBC 1.