Rewind TV: The Bridge; Smash; Grandma's House; The 70s – review - The Guardian

The Bridge (BBC4) | iPlayer

Smash (Sky Atlantic)

Grandma's House (BBC2) | iPlayer

The 70s (BBC2) | iPlayer

The discerning viewer's love affair with slow-moving, short-titled Scandinavian crime drama looks likely to continue, courtesy of The Bridge, BBC4's latest compelling reason to spend Saturday night cultivating a belated interest in some of the world's least loved languages. Keeping one eye on the plot with the other scurrying after the subtitles is generally enough, but here were other nuances. The bridge in question (the one between Sweden and Denmark) served as an atmospheric crime scene, but also an elastic metaphor for anything with two sides to it, not least the cultural space between those countries. If the refreshingly fully dressed dead woman wasn't sufficiently distracting – lying prone in the road like a work of art, her two halves (not a metaphor, as startled officers discovered when they tried to pick her up) precisely bisected by the border line – there was an odd couple to share the investigation: one a middle-aged man, the other a young woman; one Danish, the other a Swede; one chalk, the other cheese.

By far the odder of the two was detective Saga Norén of Malmo CID. You had to smile when she emerged from her Porsche, an imperious, foxy blonde striding about in leather trousers. Ah, you thought – a riposte to Sarah Lund's miserablist, big-jumpered chic in The Killing. But Saga wasn't smiling back. She didn't recognise jokes or irony, tact or discretion or, indeed, any of the signals humans switch on and off in the way of subtext. With her armoury of cold logic and finely honed forensic skills (there's nothing Saga likes better than hanging out in the morgue second-guessing the experts), the last thing she needed was Martin – a laughing bear from Copenhagen's police department – lumbering through her office eating Danish pastries and telling her about his recent vasectomy. (I have no idea about national stereotyping in that part of the world, but my guess is that Swedes are supposed to be cool but impersonal and Danes slovenly but fun.)

Anyway, she was stuck with Martin because, as the plot thickened, it turned out that only the top half of their corpse was Swedish – a politician abducted only hours before – while the bottom half belonged to a 23-year-old Danish prostitute, murdered a year earlier and kept in a freezer. Now that's what I call a case. Meanwhile, the killer, impassioned by issues of social injustice (for me, this is a far from convincing motive for cutting innocent women in half), had been busy equipping a car with a ticking bomb and a taped message explaining his greater purpose and inviting us to conclude that the two half-women positioned on the cusp of two nations – did I mention that the perpetrator had had to hack into the power grid to turn all the lights off? – were symbolic of the way there was one law for those at the top of the heap and another for those at the bottom. Clearly Saga and Martin (and it's already hard not to think of them as S&M) were dealing with the sort of maniac for whom nothing was too much trouble.

Elsewhere, progress through this double helping of a quite possibly addictive 10-part series was more leisurely. In one strand, a pushy rich woman was getting preferential heart-replacement surgery for her dying husband; in another, a drug addict was being rescued from an abusive husband by a welfare officer. Even after two episodes we were no wiser as to what either had to do with the price of fish, though I was interested to learn that you can still smoke in Danish hospitals. It wasn't as gripping as The Killing, but it was handsomely mounted, well acted and reassuringly deprived of natural light and colour. Expect a run on leather trousers.

Smash, Sky Atlantic's new series about two songwriting partners (one a jokey gay man, the other a happily married woman) getting a Broadway musical off the ground, will draw comparisons with Glee, if only because of the amount of dramatic singing and arm-waving involved. But there were no high jinks. It isn't a comedy. It isn't even a dramedy. That's not to say adult Glee fans won't love it. Smash is light on its feet and surging with money, confidence and talent. When, after a studio rehearsal, someone said: "That was amazing", it was hard to disagree. The songs and set pieces could be staged tomorrow without so much as a lick of paint. Having said that, it didn't kick off well. Why start with such a lumpen cliche as "Over the Rainbow"? It's not as if anyone was going to come in and think they were watching the neurology channel.

Like sports stories, dramas about showbiz tend to have only one direction of travel, and this showed no fear of living up to its title. The big question was who would play the leading lady (they were looking for a Marilyn Monroe) – the pretty newcomer from Iowa waiting tables or the bosomy hoofer and hollerer looking for a way out of the chorus line? It was a hard call – both had disapproving parents to prove wrong.

Everywhere, the seeds of friction were sowed: producer Eileen (Anjelica Huston at her most narrow-eyed) was supposed (by the industry) to be "out of the game" after an ugly divorce that had crippled her My Fair Lady project; the female writer was supposed (by her husband) to be taking a year off to adopt a baby; her partner in rhyme, Tom, refused to work with obnoxious British director Derek (convincingly played by Jack Davenport), who could be heard complaining to Eileen: "Gay men piss me off."

Eileen smiled: "That's an unfortunate position to take in the American theatre," she said.

I can think of no pertinent link here, but Simon Amstell returned with a second series of his very funny sitcom, Grandma's House, in which he plays a version of himself as a neurotic, gay, Jewish ex-TV presenter. Has his acting improved or do I just mind less this time around? The writing was as pointed as ever and the cast still first class, in particular Rebecca Front and James Smith (both alumni of The Thick of It), respectively playing the pushy mother Tanya and her blundering twit of an ex-beau, Clive.

This nicely rambling opener started with Simon waking up next to a 16-year-old boy and ended with Grandpa's armchair going up in flames. It takes a rare comic eye to join those dots with so little obvious effort. Those who saw his self-flagellating standup on TV recently will be wondering why he hates himself so much.

Dominic Sandbrook's The 70s squeezed a lot into the first years of a decade that began with Britain's "blessed generation" of ordinary folk marching towards a golden future only to find the bar closed when they got there. You couldn't blame them for hoping. It was an era in which a million Wimpey homes bloomed, Ted Heath talked us into Europe with a hilarious French accent and tens of thousands flew off to partly built Spanish hotels for a fortnight of fish and chips and the Daily Mirror. Everyone was having a great time except the impoverished miners. My heart went out to those grimy young men who had tragically grown their hair into improbably wavy styles (it was one of the oddities of 70s culture that macho, working-class boys so eagerly embraced the fancy-pants posturings of Bolan and Bowie) but then couldn't go to the ball.

As soon as you saw NUM chief Arthur Scargill's sensible comb-over sail into view, sideburns bristling like Shredded Wheat, you knew it wouldn't end well, and sure enough Ted's cabinet meetings were soon plunged into darkness along with the rest of the country. Things could only get worse, and of course they did. See part two for wretched details.