When you live in Sweden you pretty soon have to get used to the Swedes love of tradition. This is sometimes taken to extremes especially where the festive TV schedule is concerned. You HAVE to watch Kalle Anka on Christmas Eve or its just not Christmas, for example.
Then on New Years Day Swedish TV, for some reason, always shows Ivanhoe....Why ?? It's a crap film! Of all the films you could show why this one and why every year ?????!!! I don't get it. Can’t they show John Boorman’s Excalibur instead one year if people want to see knight on horseback?
Most bizarre of all to me though is Grevinnan och Betjänten (or "Dinner for One" as the original English stage version is called). When I arrived in Sweden, people kept mentioning this English sketch, which has been shown every year since about 1963. They could quote the whole thing word for word with the same kind of comedic enthusiasm usually reserved for Monty Python sketches.
Nobody could understand why I’d never heard of it. When I eventually got to see James and Miss Sophie and told people that I'd never seen it before in my life they couldn’t believe me, convinced as they were it must be shown in England as
a) It's English and
b) It shown just about everywhere else in Europe.
The thing is though that Dinner for One was originally recorded solely for German TV. The English TV channels were not interested in an 18minute sketch as it didn't fit into the 30minute slots typical of English TV. So while the rest of Europe gets to see it every year The British remain blissfully ignorant of its existence (which for some might be a good reason to move to England, at least for New Year).
I can see the charm in the sketch, but for me the thing I like the most is that it so perfectly sums up Swedish TV at Christmas time (and to certain extent Swedish Culture as a whole) in that immortal phrase "The same procedure as every year".
All this hardly adds to the agument given by Sweden's SVT channel that it offers a wide breadth of viewing alternatives which justifies the TV liscence...
A sign of life
6 months ago
2 comments:
You are absolutely right about this! But I think that the TV companies invented these 'traditions' so that they can show the same stuff all over and over again. It's cheaper for them. And we should get discount for TV licences which we naturally won't.
In Finland they have loaned traditions from other countries. This Dinner for one has been shown for roughly 20 years, Disney's Christmas show almost 30 years, and even the American re-run favourite Wonderful world (or something like that) has been shown for 15 years or so.
It sucks, but it's also a good enough reason not to watch TV during these holidays, don't you think :)
There are better things to do than watch a show everyone has seen every year for twenty years!
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