Saturday, January the 30th, 2016

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Knud Padde

In Forbrydelsen, the 2007 Danish TV crime thriller known here as The Killing, there was a minor character, appearing in just three of the twenty episodes, named Knud Padde. I confess that I have forgotten pretty much everything about the character but for his name—but what a name! Knud Padde ought, surely, to have his own spin-off series.

I can imagine him, dapper in his Danish duds, as one of the Four Norsemen of the Apocalypse, alongside Lars and Bengt and Erik, a quartet of impossibly sophisticated Scandinavians, noble of brow and fond of herring. I am assuming, of course, that “Norsemen” can refer to any old Scandinavian, not exclusively those from Norway, though if we had to export Knud Padde and his fellows to Norway then so be it.

We could, after all, put them on the banks of a fjord. What would the Apocalypse look like, viewed from a fjord? I asked fjord- and Apocalypse-expert Tarleton Buchbinder for his thoughts. He never called me back. I think he was taking a very long bath, in his tub, listening to a cassette tape of inspirational speeches by Patricia Fripp, sister of the guitarist Robert, husband of popstrel Toyah Wilcox.

Toyah's big hit was “It'th A Mythtery”, and I think the Knud Padde TV series ought to have a mystery element. The mystery could be some unspoken horror in Knud Padde's past, or in Lars's past, or Bengt's past, or Erik's past, or perhaps in the pasts of all four of them, the unspoken horror that brought the four of them together in the first place, on the banks of a fjord, in a high and icy wind, noble of brow and fond of herring.

This needs work.