Clive James falls for The Fall Though the mood of Scandinavian crime (darkness, snow, truly horrible serial killers) has by now spread to embrace every television production centre in the world, there is still a taste for the original aquavit and pickled herring. On BBC Four, the writer's name Arne Dahl appears as a prefix to the titles of a whole bunch of cop stories set in a Swedish crime-busters" HQ. Despite the awkward fact that they are called Team A, and thus arouse dreadful memories of The A-Team, the show they inhabit is still detectably a product of the cold and deadly north. But when you compare it with, say, The Killing, you see that there has been a change of tempo in matters of the heart. All the younger members of the team are having love affairs, sometimes with their colleagues" wives or husbands. Meanwhile all the older members look grim. None looks more grim than the woman in charge, Jenny Hultin, played by Irene Lindh. It would be fair to say that the leading role has not been cast for glamour. In The Fall (BBC One) the leading role most decidedly has been cast for glamour, not to say sexual allure. Gillian Anderson can act anything - she is especially good at high intelligence - but in this show her good looks are an important plot element. The scene is set in Belfast, which is practically in Scandinavia when you think about it. DS Stella Gibson has been brought in to deal with a case that could have been dreamed up in Malmö on a dark night. There is a Scandi-type serial killer on the loose. The unusual plot feature is that we know who he is from the start. We know he collects good-looking women and kills them by slow strangulation. Somewhere down the line in a five-episode series, he is bound to try it on with our heroine. The serial killer is married with two children, and works as - wait for it - a couples counsellor. He is mad about his targeted women but it is made clear that the especially mad part is that he wants to ruin their lives and kill them if he can. DS Gibson, meanwhile, may very well be mad about men. Early on, we see her giving a handsome male cop her hotel room number within 30 seconds of meeting him. Is there a parallelism between the detective and the weirdo? The second episode reveals that the answer is yes and no. As he gets on with the slow process of murdering another female victim, we keep cutting away to the equally slow process of DS Gibson taking her clothes off. Her chosen cop has come to call. Gibson, we discover, likes to be in control: rather like the killer, only different. Connected by editing, each finds satisfaction, in a grisly counterpoint. The general message here seems to be that sex is a powerful impulse which takes various forms of expression, and we can count ourselves lucky if they are legal. Eventually she will have to get him before he gets her. Until then, this is the show to watch. There is a series called Rip Off Britain (BBC One) which reports on all the various ways that your compatriots are trying to defraud you, and usually succeeding. The three females who present the show - Gloria Hunniford, Angela Rippon and Julia Somerville - might be downcast that they once stood in front of more glorious material, but they should take heart: this is important work. It's the very tawdriness of some of the scams that erodes the civil order. I speak as one who has only recently learned to stop shouting back at a nuisance call. Now I just press 9 to unsubscribe. But there are bigger crooks than nuisance callers out to get my remaining money, and I don't mind admitting that I need to hear everything that Gloria, Angela and Julia have to tell me. Otherwise I might fall for that irresistible real estate opportunity in Spain.