Borgen
BBC4

Why do people go on about Borgen and how great it is? Are they genuinely gripped by it? Or are they, as I suspect, deceived by its subtitles and the occasional glimpse of a Poul Henningsen artichoke lamp into admiring something that would have them laughing scornfully if it were in English?

Surely it’s the latter, for by any measure Borgen is very poor indeed: badly written, sentimental, clichéd and above all absolutely devoid of any sense of drama. Yes, it’s lovely that a TV series exists in which a woman gets to be prime minister. But are we really so desperate for our fantasies of equality to be played out on screen that we will suspend our disbelief to the point where we don’t titter when a politician changes their entire Afghanistan policy on the basis of one mushy conversation with the father of a dead soldier?

But I’m running away with myself. This is the second series of Borgen and the story so far is that Statsminister Birgitte Nyborg Christensen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is doing quite well at keeping her Moderates-led coalition government together but rather less well at married life; her husband, Philip Christensen (Mikael Birkkjær), has left her and is now waiting for her to sign their divorce papers. Meanwhile, Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen), the super ambitious and super principled political journalist, has left her TV station, TV1, and moved to a tabloid newspaper, Ekspres, where she is working alongside her old colleague, Hanne Holm (Benedikte Hansen), and the ex-leader of the opposition, Michael Laugesen (Peter Mygind), who is now its editor.

Finally, there is Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek), Brigitte’s spin doctor and Katrine’s exboyfriend. He has a new girlfriend, who wants him to move in. His Walter Mitty tendencies, however, continue unabated. He still hasn’t told anyone the truth about his father, who abused him.

As synopses go, this sounds quite good, doesn’t it? But don’t be fooled. Episode two (BBC4 screens a pair a week) was taken up almost entirely with an exciting storyline about who Birgitte would choose to be Denmark’s new EU commissioner. Should she send an experienced Moderate, such as her bearded deputy, Bent Sejro (Lars Knutzon)? Or should she despatch one of her enemies? After all, as Kasper puts it, “in Brussels, no one can hear you scream”. (Eat your heart out, Malcolm Tucker; this is what passes for wit in Borgen.) Man, I was really on the edge of my seat, let me tell you. I wonder what next week will bring. A recycling plotline? Maybe Katrine will discover that Birgitte – who appears to do absolutely everything herself, even rushing home to make dinner when her children demand a home-cooked meal – has been putting glass into her paper bin and vice versa. What a headline that would make.

Katrine needs a scoop badly. Her evil tabloid boss is straight out of central casting: Kelvin Mackenzie-meets-Mads Mikkelsen. Then again, you can’t blame him for being annoyed. She’s like no other 21st-century reporter I’ve ever seen. It’s a notebook for her, not a laptop, and she writes all her stories v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y, late at night, even if they’re for the following day’s paper. She’s also, for someone who’s supposed to be ambitious, weirdly obsessed with her spinster status (she is only 31). Naturally, her older colleague, Hanne, who’s seen it all, is a recovering alcoholic who has a pathetically dysfunctional relationship with her daughter. I mean, isn’t this what all ex-Paris correspondents with ovaries are like? Jeez. The people who delight in Borgen’s feminism really do need to think a bit harder.

We’re still no closer to finding out why Philip left Birgitte. In the last series, he got a bit fed-up when his wife’s big new job meant that he couldn’t take some pathetic little job – and the next thing you know, he was out the door. This is a pity, because he is very sexy (Mikael Birkkjær, you will recall, was Sarah Lund’s partner in the second series of The Killing; Borgen has four ex-stars of The Killing when I last counted, which, for the British viewer, has an unintentionally comic effect at times). And the one thing Borgen needs is sex. Or death. At an Ekspres editorial meeting, a reporter mentioned an escaped convict. Ooh, I thought: turn the lights off and let’s have a bit of that. But, no dice. We were soon back to Katrine, who was going to . . . a press conference at which it might, or might not, be revealed who Birgitte was sending to Brussels. Dear God. If this is how the middle classes are spending their Saturday nights, the economic pinch is much, much worse than I thought.