Edinburgh<\/a>-set Department Q among them.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n\n Yet when it was tried with Harry in the 2017 film The Snowman, no one was wild about the results. Not even Michael Fassbender as Hole (pronounced Hue-leh)\u00a0 could persuade fans that Harry had found a new home off the page.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n Now the author himself has stepped in to do the job, adapting his fifth Hole novel, The Devil\u2019s Star, into a nine\u2011part series for Netflix. Has it worked?\n<\/p>\n
\n Netflix has certainly splashed the cash, with cinema-standard opening scenes of a robbery and car chase through downtown Oslo, set to the Sex Pistols\u2019 Pretty Vacant. It is a neat way of introducing Hole, an alcoholic, as the flawed hero\/screw-up that he is. He should not be anywhere near a car, but try telling him that.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n Five years on, he is still hunting for the robber. Add to this a serial killer on the loose and a possibly corrupt cop on his team, and Harry is a busy boy.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n Read more\n<\/p>\n
\n Jason Statham-lookalike Tobias Santelmann looks the part of the Ramones-loving Harry. The series takes care to include fan favourites from the books, the twists keep coming fast and furious, and Nick Cave has supplied the very cool soundtrack for the series. Yet despite having all these advantages,\u00a0 Detective Hole fails to make much, if any, impact.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n Part of the problem is timing. The Devil\u2019s Star is more than 20 years old. There are attempts to bring the novel up to date with the digital age and its click-obsessed media, but the whole serial killer, naked women on a mortuary slab routine is horribly dated (and just plain horrible).\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n These days, it takes a lot more than a drink problem to make it as a maverick cop.\u00a0 Look at Department Q\u2019s DCI Carl Morck and his complicated life. Harry could also do with a sense of humour like Morck\u2019s. Whatever, Nesbo\u2019s creation needs to up its game if it is to ever be third time lucky.\u00a0\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
Chernobyl: 48 Hours to Escape, Channel 4, Saturday<\/p>\n
\n Four stars\n<\/p>\n
\n For an unforgettable account of the world\u2019s worst nuclear accident, it might seem hard to beat Craig Mazin\u2019s 2019 drama starring Emily Watson, Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgard.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n The documentary Chernobyl: 48 Hours to Escape (repeated Monday, 10pm, 4seven) dares to try, and in some instances succeeds.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n Described as \u201cthe untold story of the people living in the shadow of Chernobyl\u201d, the film has a surreal air from the start. Trees have sprung up across the abandoned town of Pripyat, making the place look like the opening scenes of I Am Legend. Survivors walk through the rubble, telling their stories. What on earth, you wonder, are they doing there without protective gear? One nurse was given ten years to live. Forty years on from 26 April 1986, she has beaten the odds. Countless more have not.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n We see fascinating archive footage showing the town in the hours before the explosion. People are pushing prams, eating ice cream, or going swimming in one of two municipal pools. The Soviet Union lavished facilities on the Ukrainian town because of the power plant, and gave cast-iron assurances on safety. \u201cThey had always told us that our reactor can\u2019t explode,\u201d said one man.\n<\/p>\n
\n When the seemingly impossible happened, the Soviet authorities acted quickly, but only to cover up the disaster. Scientists take up the story of what was happening at the plant, while historians describe the town\u2019s evacuation. Phones were cut off and roadblocks set up. For 48 hours people were still walking around, oblivious to the radiation in the air. The outside world was told nothing.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n Read more\n<\/p>\n
\n Some 45,000 refugees, told to pack for three days away, left the city in a fleet of buses that stretched for miles. If there was panic, there is no footage of it. Most still trusted the Soviet authorities to do the right thing.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n The filmmakers trace a credible line from Chernobyl to the beginnings of the collapse of Soviet rule. Others go beyond that to the present and beyond. The story of Chernobyl could take centuries to unfold fully. Films like this, outstanding as they are, show how far there is to go.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is one of the enduring mysteries of crime drama. Why, despite selling 60 million Harry Hole novels…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":503400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-503399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}