In show business, acts struggling to make an impact in the UK were often sardonically described as “big in Belgium”, the joke depending on the small size and perceived irrelevance of the country stuck like sand between the pushy toes of France, the Netherlands and Germany.



This year, though, Belgian television really is going to be big in Britain. Next month, Channel 4 will screen a huge hit from the tiny nation, 13 Commandments, in which a moralistic serial killer becomes a social media celebrity, as part of the network’s year-long season of Flemish-language drama..

The last major European invasion of UK television was Scandi-noir crime dramas such as The Killing and The Bridge. So is Belg-fiction the new Scandi-noir?

“I’m very very excited about what’s coming out of Belgium,” says Walter Iuzzolino, the international TV expert who curates Walter Presents, Channel 4’s foreign drama service.

Before starting the strand named after him, Iuzzolino, a 49-year-old from Genoa, spent a year watching international drama. To establish the service, he chose mainly French and Scandinavian shows.

“We went with those because those were the territories that had any kind of traction in the UK at the time,” he says. “But, even then, I was surprised and impressed by Belgium. The first show I came across – which is still one of my all-time favourites – was Clan, which Channel 4 retitled The Out-laws.”

That series about four Belgian sisters plotting the murder of their other sibling’s husband proved popular in the UK and the US (where Walter Presents is now available as a subscription service), as has Professor T, a sort of Belgian Cracker about an eccentric criminologist.

“What I loved about those shows – which I think is a characteristic of Belgian TV – is the ability to mix genre and tone,” says Iuzzolino. “It’s artistically and tonally unpredictable. You often pretty much know what you’re going to get from a Scandinavian, or French, or Italian show. But there is something about the Belgians that means a show is never entirely straight. So The Out-laws is like a family comedy stroke thriller. You’re watching something like Desperate Housewives with a gun, and then gradually it becomes darker and darker. Professor T has almost Ally McBeal-like musical and dream sequences alongside straight police procedural.”

“A sort of Belgian Cracker about an eccentric criminologist”: Professor T Photograph: GSN/Channel 4

Such tonal shifts continue – to the likely bemusement of some viewers – in this year’s wave of Belgian work. Take 13 Commandments, which combines extreme violence – including the throat-slitting of a Turkish immigrant – with odd-cop comedy between the investigating duo. Also combining darkness and farce, New Texas involves four warring siblings required by their father’s will to live happily together for a year to secure their inheritance. Scratch My Back alternates realism and surrealism in the story of a luxury retirement community, at risk of going bust, that brings in young offenders as cheap staff. Tabula Rasa is a stylish combination of detection and horror, in which the key witness to a crime suffers from a form of amnesia in which any form of stress will lead her to forget even more.

The central strength of Belgian television, says Iuzzolino, is that “their definition of genre is not as narrow as in many TV cultures. There’s less tendency to start with a dead girl in a forest, and then all you do is follow the investigation.”

Indra Siera, who has just directed the third series of Professor T, suggests that this narrative wackiness is as much necessity as invention: “We watch a lot of British and American drama, and know what the standards are, and to be honest I knew that the budget and the scripts could not match them. So I tried to put in some weirdness – music, poetry, dance numbers, dream sequences – just to give it as much distinctiveness as possible. And it seems to have worked.”

Minuscule budgets are a major problem for Siera and other Belgian TV-makers. The average budget for an hour of Belgian drama is €100,000 (around £88,000), less than a tenth of the average for peak-time British fiction, and a hundredth of what Netflix is reputed to spend on each episode of The Crown.

The Belgian TV audience is both compact and fragmented. The country has 11 million people, but these divide between populations speaking Flemish (the national variation of Dutch), French, and German, while many historical dialects, including Walloon, also flourish in pockets of the country. A reflection of the complexity of Belgian culture is that the country’s prime minister, before giving a speech, has to decide which language to speak; and some especially sensitive addresses may have alternative paragraphs in several tongues.

‘Combining darkness and farce’ ... Nieuw Texas. Photograph: VRT

Professor T, in common with Walter Presents’ other Belgian imports so far, is spoken in Flemish: “We haven’t got a Walloon drama yet,” laughs Iuzzolino. “But watch this space.” But, although it was a big success in the state broadcaster’s prestigious 9pm Sunday drama slot, Professor T had access to a maximum potential home audience of only around 2 million. This is because, says Indra Siera, “Flemish viewers generally only watch Flemish drama, and French Belgians prefer to watch French-language dramas made in France. Belgians in different regions have a very strong and independent sense of identity. I think it’s because we have such a long history of oppression by other cultures. The French, Germans, Dutch, and Austrians have all tried to dominate us. I think even Luxembourg had a go once.”

But such factional passions, believes Iuzzolino, help to make the region’s drama so distinctive: “Across the board, Belgian television maintains a slightly surreal, weird quality. And I think it’s because – culturally – the Belgians can never quite commit to only being one thing. There’s someone living a hundred metres away from them, who knocks on their door and is speaking a different language.”

A more recent source of creative inspiration may be that Belgium, long regarded as politically marginal, has been both a target and source of modern terrorism. The cell behind the attacks that killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015 was based in Belgium, and subsequently carried out atrocities at the airport and on the subway in Brussels.

When 13 Commandments is shown in Britain next month, viewers may recognise the distinctive orange armbands worn by Belgian police from the current news coverage of the trial in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, alleged to be the only survivor of the group that attacked Paris and Brussels.

Scratch My Back. Photograph: Publicity image

“13 Commandments,” agrees Iuzzolino, “directly reflects the current European political situation in very many ways. The first episode – in which a young Muslim girl is effectively executed by a member of her family – is almost too painful to watch. But then it becomes more and more complex. It’s about a very modern world in which the public yearns for someone to offer moral opposition to politicians, business, the media. It’s about a serial killer who becomes a sort of modern-day Moses, wanting to reveal the lies and contradictions of society.”

When Iuzzolino first made inquiries about the foreign rights to Belgian shows, he met surprise from the distributors: “Until Walter Presents, they had no real foreign interest at all.”

Siera recalls: “The foreign reviews for season 2 came in when we were shooting season 3, and I read them out to the cast on set, and they were completely amazed. They never expected anyone to interested.”

The third season of Professor T even includes an appearance, in a fantasy sequence, by a Walter lookalike, as a thank-you for his backing. But Siera remains cautious about yet claiming Scandinavia’s crown as TV’s to exporter: “We have a long way to go. We know that. We’re a very very small country.”

For Iuzzolino, the lesson of the Belgian successes – and of Walter Presents in general – is that “audiences are often ahead of the broadcasters. Sometimes, the gatekeepers of taste are too restrictive.”

He is conscious of the oddity of having spent two years bringing European culture to UK viewers at the exact time that 52% of the electorate was agitating for greater political distance from Britain’s neighbours, and, given the EU’s power-base in Brussels, from Belgium especially.

“Yes. It has come at a very strange time,” Iuzzolino says. “I’m an Italian, living in London, and have dual citizenship: so I’m quite pro-European. But, with the greatest respect for whatever political position one might have, I think it’s just very important to keep your eyes open to other cultures.”

13 Commandments screens on Channel 4 and All 4 next month. Tabula Rasa, New Texas and Scratch My Back will follow later in the year.