Swedish History Through Punk

Sunday, nine o'clock, and something in the room is humming. It isn't the mast. Degsy's mam moved into the unit next door on Friday, and the first thing she did was plug in the fridge.

She says she only came because Degsy's postcard said "wish you were 'ere". Gaz reckons that's the most Swedish thing that has ever happened in the room. In 1867 the north of Sweden got frost in July, and one night in September finished off the harvest. By the time it was over, more than a million Swedes had gone to America. When a government investigator asked fifty men on an emigrant ship in 1907 why they were going, not one of them was heading somewhere he knew nobody. Somebody went first and wrote home, and in the early 1880s close to half of those who followed travelled on a ticket somebody else had already paid for.

The way out ran through England: two days from Gothenburg to Hull, where landing on a Sunday made you a "bona fide traveller" who could drink in any pub at any hour, then an emigrant train with no toilet across the Pennines to Liverpool. One of the early ones, in 1853, went straight through Salford in the dark. Back home, the great and the good founded a society against emigration — in a Stockholm restaurant.

And under the custard creams in Brenda's handbag, there's a ring.

Two new punk tracks off the back of it: PREPAID and ANOTHER PERSON.

The history is fact-checked. The mangling is the comedy.
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Sunday, nine o'clock — exactly when they said they'd be on. Gaz has had a wash. The phone is on the bench. It doesn't ring.

So Gaz tells Degsy about the herring. Autumn 1747, the shoals pour into the Bohuslän fjords and stay for sixty years. Fishing is free, so people with nothing build shacks on bare rocks and go into business. By the 1780s there are over four hundred boiling-houses on the coast, turning whole herring into lamp oil and tipping the rest into the sea — and when the crown cracks down, the Gothenburg merchants come back with two hundred witnesses swearing the stink is harmless.

Then, one autumn, the herring doesn't come. And halfway through the broadcast, the landlord does — because it's the first, and the rent is due.

Two new punk tracks off the back of it: THE HERRING'S IN and IT'S EARLY.

The history is fact-checked. The mangling is the comedy.
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Three nights running out of a rented unit in Bohuslän, and someone out at sea has started ringing the landlord's office to ask when they're on.

So Gaz tells Degsy the story of the people who did this first — and it isn't the one Degsy thinks. Radio Mercur, off Copenhagen, 2 August 1958. Radio Nord, anchored off the Stockholm skerries in 1961 and run by a Finland-Swedish businessman on Texas money. Radio Caroline, six years late, sailing the very same hull.

Then Sweden wrote a law with one station's name on it, and left one word in it. A forty-seven-year-old former revue actress called Britt Wadner kept transmitting anyway. They fined her. They prosecuted her advertisers. In March 1965 they jailed her — and she did her Sunday programme first, all of it, before going to Hinseberg women's prison as prisoner 516 and running the station from her cell.

Two new punk tracks off the back of it: FIVE NAMES and PRISONER 516.

The history is fact-checked. The mangling is the comedy.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season two. Fifteen hundred kilometres south of the mast they gave back, Gaz and Degsy stand in a field in Bohuslän underneath a thirty-metre satellite dish — and sign a lease. Two thousand kronor a month plus VAT, toilet shared, no welding after six. Their landlord is Roy, who owns the machine station and the dead teleport it sits in, and who has one rule: he doesn't ask what his tenants do, and he doesn't lie for them either.

Tanum Teleport opened in 1971, the first in the Nordics. Thirty people worked here around the clock in the eighties; if you rang Australia, the call went through this field. On the fifteenth of June 1973 the first computer link ever to leave America came through here too — Virginia to Norway. It was switched off in 2002, the equipment was sold, and the dishes stayed, because taking them down costs more than leaving them pointing at the sky.

A few miles up the road there is a rock twenty-two metres long with three hundred figures cut into it. Ships, wagons, ploughs, men in horned helmets — which are bronze age, not Viking, whatever Degsy's tattoo says. When it was carved the sea was higher and that rock stood at the water's edge, where every boat had to look at it. Nobody paid the man who made it. He just wanted somebody, some day, to see it.

Then they open a floor duct they were told to leave alone, and find out where the dish is still pointing.

Contains strong language throughout. The history is fact-checked; the punks are not.
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Season finale. At eight o'clock on Monday morning a technician arrives with a skylift to write down whatever he finds on the mast. So the lads spend the last night taking their own gear off it — live on air, one bracket at a time, until the transmitter goes quiet for good.

Tonight's history is Birgitta Birgersdotter. Born into the top of Swedish society around 1303, married off at thirteen, widowed with eight children — and then she starts having visions and writing them down. She sends a king east on a crusade and takes God back off him when it fails. She leaves Sweden in 1349 and never comes home alive. From Rome she dictates seven hundred revelations in Swedish for a prior to turn into Latin, and spends twenty-four years telling four popes in Avignon that they are sitting in the wrong house. One of them she calls worse than Lucifer and more merciless than Judas. Another she tells to his face that he will die if he gets on the boat. He got on the boat.

Meanwhile Brenda finds out where the mast actually came from, and what her sons put in her mouth. Bengt turns up out of uniform. And Sixten writes the shortest report of his career, every word of it true.

They boiled her bones and carried her home over the Alps. It took seven months. The letters were already there.

Contains strong language throughout. The history is fact-checked; the punks are not.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.