I just wanted to say that I enjoyed the BBC version of Shetland that was finally broadcast this week. I've no intention of writing at length because to be honest I'm a bit fed up with hearing/reading about it. Half the people who comment are moaning because the accents weren't authentically Shetland, and half were moaning about how they couldn't understand what was being said because the actors mumbled and used Scottish accents. And then there are the purists who whine about how it wasn't exactly like the book.
Shetland doesn't really have an accent. It has a dialect. I know that people argue about which it is until the cows come home and fall asleep in the barn, but to me it's a dialect. It's full of words that are particular to Shetland or which bear only a passing resemblance to their English equivalent. Cleeves very sensibly didn't use dialect in her Shetland Quartet books and it was a wise decision not to use it on the television either.
As for plot changes, I learned long ago that you go with the flow or you just don't watch. As an avid reader of Jane Austen, the low point came when I saw a version of Persuasion in which Anne Elliott not only went out into the streets of Bath on her own, but ran through the pouring rain and ended up kissing Wentworth in the street. Obviously this would never have happened. Gently bred late Georgian girls didn't do that. That one thing destroyed a whole ethos of storytelling and gave the lie to what the book is really about. For me a bit of plot tinkering with a detective novel isn't really on a par. Would I have liked to see the inclusion of the sub plot about the Heritage Centre and the fraudulent claiming of grant money? Definitely yes. Would I actually have preferred the killer to be the same in the book and the TV version of it? Not quite so definitely but probably yes. Did either of these changes actually affect my enjoyment of the program? No.
You pays your money, as the old saying goes, and takes your choice.
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