The whole original and best version in one mad block of programmes so that fans and newcomers, people who missed the series first time around, and those hungry to watch it again, can submerge themselves in an ocean of Danish criminal procedure, Faroese pullovers and riveting whodunnit tension.

I loved it the first time round.

Deputy Superintendent Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl) and Jan Meyer (Søren Malling)

Such an original piece of work, classy and beautifully plotted, the real draw of The Killing is its masterful and unyielding determination to stay focused on that single murder, that single investigation and that single (not to say singular) police investigator, Sarah Lund.

Yet at the same time it does not shy away from the mass of rippling consequence that comes to so many individuals when an act of brutality comes smashing into otherwise relatively still lives.

I feel, and have always done, that BBC Four is the place to showcase the best of television from around the world, and that language - ie not English - isn't a barrier to the channel's audience.

In some ways, oddly, The Killing's sub-titles actually help.

It allows us to focus and concentrate and really absorb the other-worldness of the programme.

BBC Four is the premier channel for people who like to think, for whom authorship, intelligent comment and entertaining perspective on mainstream subjects is their way of enjoying television.

And, perhaps, in Sarah Lund there is a character who reflects something of these traits in her own character.

Pernille Birk Larsen (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen) and Theis Birk Larsen (Bjarne Henriksen)

Singular, often unpredictable but always inquiring and as a consequence, both interesting and attractive.

There will be some who say that this should be noted even more because she is a woman. I disagree.

Though the actress Sofie Gråbøl explains she treated the role of Lund by acting like a man to start off with, in the drama her gender is, in my view, noteworthy only because it actually doesn't matter.

She is a police officer with an utter fascination for detective work, and in that one compulsion, her personal life suffers - an always watchable trait in our television police dramas.

At the same time, The Killing is most definitely a story of our times in whatever society we live in.

The family dramas, the workplace frictions, the media pressures, the modern politics: I feel we can all relate to that.

So enjoy this chance to watch The Killing again, and prepare yourselves for the return of Sophie Lund in The Killing II later this year, exclusively on BBC Four.

Richard Klein is the controller of BBC Four. He recently wrote about the channel's new role as curator of archive BBC content on the About the BBC Blog.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

A BBC Four audience is one that gets its kicks out of delighting in discourse. I believe that all human life can be found in almost any subject - it just requires some imagination and an insatiable curiosity.

And there's plenty on offer over the next six months to hopefully slake that thirst.

One of the most exciting new shows is Scrapheap Orchestra, a 90-minute film based around a plan to construct an entire orchestra's instruments out of rubbish.

Not some environmental axe being ground, just a fun and sometimes insightful exercise in unpacking what makes instruments work. How do they produce sound, from a violin to a trombone, a drum to a timpani?

And this final 44-piece orchestra is going to prove that it can play proper as it were, by putting on a concert this summer and playing the 1812 Overture.

Another charmer on offer is a wonderfully spirited reassessment of British painting in the 20th century, British Masters.

While the rest of the world was busy discovering itself in abstraction, the British - from Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon to David Hockney and Lucian Freud - were linking up with a very British painterly sensibility and producing some of the greatest figurative and landscape works of art of the 20th century.

And who better than art historian Dr James Fox to explore what he believes is an extraordinary flowering of this painterly genius?

By way of contrast, Regency is a three part series on that most dashing of periods - the British Regency of 1811 to 1820.

The mainstream is where BBC Four plies its trade, except the channel reflects that mainstream back in a nuanced, opinionated and provocative way.

And I'm delighted that the irrepressible Dr Lucy Worsley will explore a decade of riotous creativity, passions and, by no means least, outrageous behaviour.

At the heart of her series stands the compelling central figure of George, the Prince Regent himself. Have fun! Lucy certainly does.

It is spring, after all, and I was keen that the channel reflected what a wonderful moment in the year this always is - a new start, Easter and rebirth acknowledged and now a wonderful, glorious warming of the earth around us.

So to This Green And Pleasant Land, part of BBC Four's landscape moment.

Until relatively recently the idea of depicting what the countryside actually looked like was considered, if considered at all, frankly, bizarre.

This Green And Pleasant land recounts how gradually the glories of our natural surroundings took centre stage.

Look out, in the same season, for Tom Fort's heart-warming film about one of my favourite roads, the A303. It is a journey that spans 94 miles, four centuries and one man's motoring love affair.

To accompany this, we have not just Julia Bradbury back in her walking boots tramping along canals in Canal Walks, but a whole week on Iceland - with some fabulous scenery and scary tales from the Viking age.

There's also a whole season on plants and flowers headed up by our new series Botany: A Blooming History.

And there's tons more. In Afterlife, we're building an installation in Edinburgh's Zoological Gardens, filling it with loads of household goods and food and then turning up the heating to watch how things rot, decompose and, amazingly, go on to form the cornerstones and new building blocks of new life - very BBC Four.

Plus there's a film about Terence Rattigan, Rattigan by Benedict Cumberbatch, a season on how Britain filmed and documented itself, and a Luxury season.

And Timothy Spall's back on his boat, with his partner Shane, continuing his idiosyncratic sail around Britain in Timothy Spall: Somewhere On The Irish Sea.

But enough of the lists, the best news is that The Killing is back.

After screening the most talked-about crime thriller in British television for years - The Killing 1 - I am delighted to say that this intense, complex and enthralling drama series is back, Shetland sweaters, Sarah Lund and all.

So relax and enjoy the turning of the seasons with BBC Four.

Richard Klein is the controller of BBC Four.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

This time last year I wrote about the pleasures of three artistic women's lives dramatised - Enid, Gracie and Margot. This year, it's the story of how one man rewrote the rule of British television drama when he created in a single moment ITV's premier TV asset, Coronation Street.

Tony Warren's story of ordinary working people's everyday lives, set in a backstreet of a northern English industrial town was a sensation from the moment it hit the airwaves - live, no less! - in December 1960.

But it very nearly didn't happen. The Granada TV bosses decided people wouldn't want northern working classes voices in their living rooms via the telly. How wrong they were.

What was at first called Florizel Street went on to become Coronation Street, one of television's most enduring dramas.

It's not the only great show of course.

This autumn sees the always-excellent Michael Wood stand centre stage in Michael Wood's Story of England, a major series that tells the story of the English through the ordinary garden discoveries of people living in a small market town in Leicestershire - and you've never seen so much excitement and fuss over a few bits of broken pottery!

But it is amazing, truly, to see just how close to the big historical events even this village is, that this village's story of ordinary people through the ages, from Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Tudor, Georgian, Industrial Revolution and onwards, is reflected in this place. Terrific.

One other highlight I'd raise is BBC Four's Germany season. Yes, I am German, brought up on a farm in north Germany, and as a (semi) foreigner I have always been struck by how little the British seemed to know or comprehend of Germany's extraordinary culture, physical beauty and history.

Of course two World Wars don't half obscure the view and I understand that. But in Andrew Graham-Dixon's lovely series Art Of Germany I hope you'll see a new side of this country, culturally speaking, and in Julia Bradbury's charming German Wanderlust you'll hopefully be astounded and wowed by the sheer physical beauty of this vast country.

And, finally, I hope you'll be entertained by Al Murray's German Adventure (yes the Pub Landlord himself) as he tours Germany and finds out more about the country on a whistle-stop tour.

There's plenty more interesting programmes - from The Story Of British Sculpture to Anna Nicole - The Opera, the new Royal Opera House piece on glamour model Anna Nicole Smith, to the return of Jo Brand in Getting On.

And now, back to the rain, the wind and August.

Richard Klein is controller of BBC Four

But it was there between the tears that I began to feel better. Because, perhaps for the first time, I began see the father that this man really was. He had kept every payslip, every school report, every photo of his life and the lives of his family.

I saw that this detached, quite difficult and certainly non-hugging man was every bit a loving, concerned and conscientious father who had seen as paramount in his life the task of dutiful father.

Over the next three weeks BBC Four is running a Fatherhood season celebrating fathers and the concept of fatherhood.

BBC Four prides itself on attaching a new lens to familiar subject matter and stimulating viewers to reconsider that world through a different prism. Call it intelligent television entertainment.

So this season highlights the story of a revolution that hasn't been celebrated enough. But it also recalibrates the story of fathers in what might seem a rather counter-intuitive way.

Contrary to popular myth fathers have always been involved, interested and caring about their families.

What attracted me to creating the season is how the 20th century has seen enormous changes in family life, the role of parents, the role of women and so forth - including my one (I am divorced and a single father).

But it has also seen an extraordinary change in the role of fathers. Or at least that's what you'd think reading the avalanche of magazine articles and opinion pieces that take a view on useless dads, absent dads and, more recently, new dads.

Judging by some newspaper yardsticks dads are either too stupid to tie their own shoelaces or too awful to be let near children. Sometimes both.

Countering this view of cruel idiocy is also a sense that the modern father has finally come home, got in touch with his inner self and embraced his family, ending up walking off in the sunset, children in his arms, possibly weeping gently with the emotion of it all, but at long last a part of the family - and now no longer the ogre, the distance, cold authority figure that we all know is what they used to be before we discovered, wait for it, ourselves.

But according to producer Steve Humphries in his heartwarming three-part documentary series A Century of Fatherhood, that view is simply wrong. Fathers were always close to their families when they could be.

They were always striving to provide the best they could for their children. And they were approachable, generous men who were much loved - not feared - by their sons and daughters.

And perhaps the most radical idea Humphries proposes is that the cold detached Edwardian father is a myth, that fathers then were as committed to their duties as fathers as any other generation and that they created loving and warm close personal attachments to their children.

Professor Joanna Burke comments in the programme: "The image we have of fathers in the past is absolutely, totally wrong. If you actually look at dads in the past the vast majority are loving, warm fathers."

Dr Julie-Marie Strange adds: "In Edwardian Britain we think very much of fathers being absent from family life - and they're absent because they're in work being providers."

It turns out that the First World War, the pernicious propaganda of the temperance movement and some rather traumatised upper class writers have portrayed fathers in a way that isn't wholly accurate.

Either fathers were away because they had to be - work, there was a war on and a nationhood to be saved; or else it simply suited some to portray men - especially those unwashed working classes - as feckless swine drinking away their children's very bread and butter.

When writing about their own class, the posh lot held sway with their portrayal of cruel and distant fathers who sent children away to boarding school while they ran empires and lorded it on the estate, rattling around big country houses. Reflecting, so it seems, their own lives rather than the lives of the vast majority.

The Second World War didn't help either, by all accounts. It had a devastating effect on family life in Britain, and in particular on fathers.

Some were away for years on end and ended up hardly knowing their children upon their return. Others were damaged by their war time experiences at a time when the impact of post traumatic stress was little known and, if anything, belittled.

These men struggled to fit in to a world that had changed in their absence. It is well recorded that the divorce rate after WW2 escalated as couples discovered two lives had simply grown apart.

And of course the birth of the teenager meant that fathers who had a traditional view of their role in the house suddenly found that they were not longer in control.

And as extra-marital affairs, divorce, and the impact of a sexual revolution crashed in on human lives, it seemed to some that the new freedoms of post war Britain were destroying the institution of marriage and fatherhood themselves.

But despite all this change, what is surprising is not just that fathers have had a much closer and more loving relationship with their children than you might think from popular literature, newspaper columns or television.

It is that the bond and love between father and child has remained, for most dads, most of the time, an enduring and powerful bond.

Of course, it's not just in the real world that fathers have a role to play. Writer Andrew Martin's sharp-eyed film, Disappearing Dad, takes a witty approach to the whole subject.

It seems, he suggests, we need our fictional fathers to be dramatised in a certain way to make the story dramatic. In fiction you have one of three choices. Either your father is just plain absent - The Railway Children, for example. Or he's the cold distant stern authority figure - think Dickens, Frances Hodgson Burnett and just about every other Victorian and Edwardian novelist.

Or, more recently, the late twentieth century dad: dim, out of touch and beleaguered by life. Interestingly the outcome in all three cases is usually the same. At some point dad will finally, duh, see the light and, er, bond. It is a staple you will recognise in any half-witted American comedy or drama. All is well after all.

I also wanted to try and see if there is any science in fatherhood too, so I asked scientist Dr Laverne Antrobus to take a look.

What has been really surprising is the discovery that men, fathers-to-be in fact, literally do change when their wives or partners get pregnant and give birth to their children. Dr Antrobus' film, Biology of Dads, suggests that when their wives have babies men go rather gooey (hormonally speaking) just as their womenfolk do, which makes them rather good at picking up the tot and empathising with them.

Finally a bit of drama. The season also features a new film, Lennon Naked, a searing portrait of John Lennon, played by Christopher Eccleston, as a man who struggles to come to terms with his unloved childhood.

In the late 1960s Lennon met up with his father for the first time after 17 years. Shortly afterwards he meets Yoko Ono, leaves his wife and own son, breaks up the Beatles and leaves Britain, forever, for America.

It is a drama that seeks to explore what happens when a great artist comes face to face with his own, painfully unloved childhood - and emphasises the importance of fatherhood in a shocking way.

I am a single father these days. My daughter is the apple of my eye and I do plenty of hugging and kissing - far too much for her liking, in all probability.

But while my father never did that with me - and, frankly, I wouldn't have wanted it, I often remember that day in his flat clearing up his things and I like to think it helps me to hold true to his version of fatherhood of commitment, duty and, where possible, a reliable presence.

Tree-hugging it ain't, and nor is it a very visible, modern, form of emotional intelligence. But, to steal a phrase, it is a kind of loving.

Richard Klein is controller of BBC Four

Novelist Andrew Martin has also written for the BBC TV Blog on his documentary for the Fatherhood season, Disappearing Dad.

Often tragic with a strong theme of the comic about them, these stories become iconic windows on our world. And when I hear or read about them there is always a little bit of me that thinks there but for the grace of God go I.

Norman Hull is a director who likes to explore the inner workings of his characters. In the story of John and Anne Darwin he struck a rich seam of material to draw upon. A couple who found themselves caught up in a spiral of debt, then, seemingly unwilling to face the normal consequences of bankruptcy, they opted to, well, opt out.

And then the hare-brained scheme - part comic and absurd, part cruel and slightly crazy - to pretend to drown at sea while on a canoeing trip in order to claim life insurance.

Follow this up with a madcap plan to live out the rest of their lives in Central America - of all places, Central America! - and then to find that, ah, oh dear, they need new visas in order to live in Panama permanently and they have to return to Britain to get them.

And finally, maddest - or perhaps most desperate - of all: the plan to go to the police and claim a five year disappearance was to be explained by a spot of memory loss. As I say, you couldn't make it up.

Bernard Hill turned up to play John Darwin - a role he took to with aplomb. Bernard delivers a performance that subtly plays with John Darwin's character, exploiting for both comic and tragic effect the gap between his apparent heartlessness towards his own children and his desperate attempts to get out of the sticky mess he finds himself in.

Saskia Reeves also plays a blinder. Again, in the way that BBC Four dramas celebrate, she plays the complexity of Anne Darwin's situation with an elegant mix of emotion and deranged wifely support. Anne Darwin is, perhaps, the most conflicted and least understood character in this very human story.

The judge at her trial condemned her outright as the plot's mastermind and called her manipulative. Norman chooses to see her role in a more complicated way, suggesting that while she was very much part of the scheme she was also more aware than her husband of the emotional damage the reckless scam was causing, especially to her two sons.

Getting the film made was an achievement in itself. I am delighted that the producers met the Darwins' two sons, Anthony and Mark to gain their support and permission to portray them in the drama. What Norman wanted to do was not a simple re-telling but something more ambitious and the sons were happy to support it.

Anthony and Mark visited the set during the filming of the scene where Bernard Hill as John Darwin is interviewed by police. The script is verbatim of the real life police interview. Like of all us, they were fascinated by the magic of film-making. Though the circumstances were sensitive, both were very amused by Saskia's two wigs in the costume and make up truck - for looking uncannily like their mum's real hairstyle.

One of the aims of BBC Four is to employ style and wit, to entertain as it informs, that is as warm and affectionate as it is knowledgeable and insightful. The channel, at all turns, aims to deliver programming of distinction for people who love to think.

BBC Four is known for sensational biographical films and clever, attractive literary adaptations. It's great, therefore, to be able to branch out into broader factual territory.

Canoe Man is essential a tragedy but through good drama we can not only recognise the comedy but also the humanity and the reality - a very BBC Four approach!

Richard Klein is controller of BBC Four