Despite the awful (brutalist) architecture outside, I spent an enjoyable afternoon being shown around Sveriges Television (SVT) today. The building itself - the TV-hus - is large, with six stages and a large props department. The wisdom of having stages, carpentry and costume teams in what is relatively expensive real estate north of Djurgarden and close to a number of embassies was not obvious to me, but I was told that there are frequent debates about whether to get rid of the whole thing, outsourcing costume and props production as well. These debates have so far gone nowhere, because outsourcing of that kind would not easily be irreversible.
More wide-reaching structural changes might come soon. Apparently the new borgerligt government has not granted the (semi-automatic) three year extension to SVT’s charter, promising to think more about the role of SVT and SR. It’s possible Sweden might follow Estonia in unifying their radio and television PSBs.
I found two interesting tid-bits in passing.
- Sveriges Television’s call-sign, SVT, was not their first choice. It would have been STV (Swedish TeleVision, presumably) were it not for the Scottish ITV franchise and EBU member STV, established in 1957 just before SVT. As a Scot, I felt a little bit of national pride in our having beaten our Nordic neighbours to a three-letter acronym.
- SVT managed to annoy many Italians with their ‘Free Television’ campaign, which showed clips of Putin and Berluscon, and ended with the tag - SVT - free television. (See the clip). The Italian government - with Berlusconi as Prime Minister at the time - contacted the Swedish embassy, which rightly replied that it was not the government’s business how SVT advertised itself.
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