Annika (TV Program)

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    ‘Annika’ Star Nicola Walker on the Book She’d Save From a Burning Home

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    When it comes to the actress’s favorite things, give her the American version of “Alone” and a true-crime podcast from Australia.No one broods quite like Nicola Walker, whose eyes have transfixed viewers in television shows like “Unforgotten,” “Last Tango in Halifax” and “The Split.”In “Annika,” the British crime drama now in its second season on PBS, she holds that gaze as a marine homicide detective, her speedboat slicing through the waters near Glasgow.But in a video interview while just outside London, where she lives with her husband, the actor Barnaby Kay, and their teenage son, Harry, Walker was radiant and witty. When she agreed to talk about her cultural essentials — true-crime podcasts, the theater director Ivo van Hove, the harrowing reality series “Alone” — she recalled her agent asking if she was going to be truthful.“I said, ‘Is it bad if I tell them that really one of my cultural highlights this week has been sitting in my underwear, eating a bag of Spanish Lays crisps with a can of Coke, watching the ‘Beckham’ documentary?’”“Now I’m in love with both of them,” Walker added. “David and Victoria.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Touching the ArtWhen I was a young girl, we moved to rural Essex, and the nearest town was Harlow — one of the new towns built post-World War II. Frederick Gibberd, the architect, thought that ordinary people should brush up against art in their everyday lives. On the way to the shopping center, I’d walk past sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Rodin. I used to climb all over Hepworth’s “Contrapuntal Forms,” and no one ever stopped you. Hepworth said statues must be touched — that’s how they begin.2Stewart LeeI’ve always loved stand-up because I could never do it, and Stewart is, for me, the best stand-up working for years now. I recommend “Content Provider.” It’s like he smashes up the rules of comedy, glues them back together and then throws them at you.3Ivo van HoveWatching Ivo or being directed by Ivo is like having an injection of energy and hope, because he makes theater in a way that you realize you’ve always wanted theater to be made.4Toni MorrisonI lost my mother a very long time ago. Too young. She bought me a copy of “Beloved” when I went up to university, and she wrote in it, “To My Beloved.” That thing they say about what you would save from your burning house, apart from pets? That book. I was 19, and it opened up the whole world.5The U.S. Version of ‘Alone’The U.K. one was like a family camping trip gone wrong: They’ve got lost in the dark and they’re scared of the foxes and the owls hooting. Then we happened to see “Alone USA.” Crikey. Ten people. Bears, wolverines. I watched a man win a series because he shanked a musk ox to death.6‘Closing Time’When I was pregnant, I played “Closing Time” on a loop, and Harry used to sort of wriggle. I don’t know whether I’ve made that up, but all I know is he loves Tom Waits. When Harry was about 3, I went for a fitting at a famous costumier, and Tom Waits walked in. I was too scared to say, “My 3-year-old knows all the words to ‘Closing Time.’” I really regret it, and my son has never forgiven me.7Sylvia PlathWhen I was 16, I really identified with her. All that introspection of youth. You’re allowed to be that doom-laden because you’re so young. As a 53-year-old, I don’t see myself. I see Sylvia Plath, and I want to literally jump in the book and save her.8Reciting PoetryI love reading poetry out loud. This might be due to studying English at Cambridge. One of my favorite poems is Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” — the idea that you have to tie the poem down to a chair and beat it into submission to give up its meaning. I felt that’s what I did as a student, and it took me ages to find my way back to poetry because, for me, it was work. But now I think it’s flesh and bones when you say those words.9Playlists for RolesThey give me the confidence to step out of the caravan and walk on set. Annika’s playlist was fabulously eclectic: Benjamin Clementine’s “Nemesis,” David Bowie’s “Fill Your Heart,” The Darkness’s “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.”10Murder ShowsI have a guilty obsession that a lot of women have (as “S.N.L.” pointed out in a very good musical skit): true crime. There’s this Australian podcast, “Casefile,” and the guy always starts with this warning, “This podcast contains stories of a sexual nature, injury to women,” or whatever. And my husband’s shouting, “Are you listening to that bloody man talking about killing women again?” Yeah, I am. Why am I? It’s the same reason we like crime dramas. Because the comfort of watching something that terrifies you and seeing it resolved makes you feel a little bit safer. More

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      ‘Annika’ Review: The Detective Would Like to Have a Word With You

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      Nicola Walker plays a cop who works out her issues by talking to the audience in a “Masterpiece” mystery on PBS.A detective whose unit investigates waterborne crimes walks onto a bridge, looks into the camera and says, “Call me Annika.” She then proceeds to chat with the audience about Ahab and his white whale while she watches a murder victim being pulled from the River Clyde.That was our introduction to the British crime drama “Annika,” and through two seasons (the second premieres Sunday as part of PBS’s “Masterpiece”) the heroine has continued to talk to the audience: agonizing over her complicated relationships, thinking through her cases, delivering deadpan ripostes unheard by the other characters onscreen. And in each episode she invokes a literary work — “Twelfth Night,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a Scottish ballad about a kidnapped child — that ties into that week’s story in subtle or, somewhat more often, obvious ways.That might sound like a double deal-breaker, and I clicked away from “Annika” the first time I heard the words “Moby-Dick.” But I knew I would return to it, because Annika Strandhed, the Norwegian-born, Glasgow-based cop, is played by Nicola Walker — an actress whose ubiquity on British television is entirely justified by the wry, layered humanity she brings to all her characters. Walker’s ability to flesh out the emotions lurking beneath self-consciousness and awkwardness makes the first-person conceit of “Annika” not just tolerable but apt and engaging.The prominence of her voice in the series also flows naturally from the show’s source, “Annika Stranded,” a BBC drama podcast about an Oslo homicide detective that was a solo showcase for Walker. (Both shows were created by Nick Walker, who is no relation to Nicola Walker, if you can believe it.) The television show supplies Annika, who relocates to Glasgow to lead a fictional outfit called the Marine Homicide Unit, with a three-person investigative team, a lonely but good-humored teenage daughter and a sometime love interest, who happens to be the daughter’s therapist.That’s a standard complement for a series of this type, and aside from the protagonist’s fourth-wall-breaking, “Annika” is a typical British cop show, in the categories of regional and serio-comic. It boasts lovely Scottish scenery, with side trips to places like Edinburgh and the Hebrides, and spends a lot of its time on or near the water. It’s a dead-body-of-the-week show with a sense of humor that is perched comfortably between dark and twee; it could be a more literate, more serious cousin of “Midsomer Murders” or “Monk.”The homicide cases mostly have the eccentric origins that this subgenre calls for — a tech billionaire drowned in his basement aquarium; a body pulled out of the North Sea encased in a block of ice — and their solutions can seem almost beside the point, an impression that grows stronger in the new season. The forensics sessions and computer searches and sudden flashes of deduction have a cookie-cutter familiarity; the most invigorating aspect of the police work is the show’s fetish for slapstick foot chases, which commence about twice an episode.A little perfunctoriness in the mysteries can be excused, though, given the overall pleasure to be had from Walker’s performance. Annika tends to her team more or less ably, but her work suffers from the strain she puts on herself by making a hash of her personal life. She is buoyant and fun-loving beneath a heavy mantle of fierce Nordic repression, and Walker’s mastery of stumbles, stammers and brief, piercing embarrassment keeps us on the character’s side.Walker has a natural genius for establishing rapport with an audience, demonstrated in domestic melodramas like “The Split” and “Last Tango in Halifax” and in a succession of crime dramas. The best of those was the wonderful cold-case series “Unforgotten,” which she led for four seasons until her character was killed off in an arbitrary and dramatically unsatisfying fashion. “Unforgotten” returned for a fifth season last month (also on “Masterpiece”) with a new detective played by Sinead Keenan, and it was still very good — taken as a whole, it’s superior in writing (by Chris Lang) and direction (by Andy Wilson) to “Annika.” But without Walker, it doesn’t speak to us in quite the same way. More