Swedish History Through Punk

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.

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.

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.

Sunday. There's a leg of lamb on, a policeman at the table, and the technician who's writing the report about the mast sitting right next to him. So Gaz hides the microphone in the fruit bowl and broadcasts the dinner — because Monday morning at eight, a skylift arrives.Tonight's history is the worst thing that ever happened in a Swedish parish. In 1674 two teenagers were hired, paid twenty öre, and stood at the church door at Torsåker to point out the witches among the women walking in to worship. Around a hundred were named. Two hundred children testified, some of them five years old — and their own fathers walked them to the courthouse. On the 1st of June 1675, seventy-one people were led up a hill: sixty-five women, two men and four boys. Beheaded, then burned on three fires, one for each village. One in five of all the women in the parish.Then a boy pointed at the priest's own wife. She slapped him, and he said he'd got the sun in his eyes. So it could stop. It just had to point at somebody whose husband mattered.Nobody in that story thought they were the villain. That's the whole point of it. And there is someone at this table who has just worked out that she pointed too.Every week this show ends with somebody telling the establishment to do one. Not this week — nobody at Torsåker got any last words at all.Featuring Gaz, Degsy, Brenda Higginbottom, Konstapel Bengt Johansson, and, for the first time, Sixten, who learned his English off Buzzcocks sleeves.Music: "Sun In Me Eyes" and "Seventy-One".A memorial stone was raised on Häxberget in 1975. It reads: women died, men judged, the belief of the age comes down on people.

There is a man standing on the mast. So tonight the whole show is whispered — and then the lads play punk records at full volume through the mast he's standing on.Which makes them exactly like tonight's king. In March 1792 Gustav III was handed a note at supper telling him he would be killed that night. He went to the masked ball anyway, wearing a mask, a cape — and the shiniest badge in Sweden pinned to his chest, which is precisely what gave him away.Gaz tells it: the bloodless coup of 1772, the Swedish Academy, the opera house he built and was later murdered in, and the war he wasn't legally allowed to start — so he had his opera tailors sew Russian uniforms and shot at his own border post. Degsy is confidently wrong about coffee. Bengt lies out loud for the first time in twenty-two years and asks for the mast to come down before Monday. And Brenda, out of nothing but pride, tells the technician exactly who they are — then corrects his spelling of Higginbottom.For once in this series, it was the establishment that told the king to do one.Contains strong language throughout. The history is fact-checked; the punks are not.

After a whole series of the Kalmar Union being torn apart, tonight the lads tell how it was BUILT — by a woman. Queen Margaret I welds three crowns into one. Meanwhile the Luleå police have flagged the mast that still won't stop interfering with their radio, and Bengt — Brenda's policeman — comes to quietly warn the boys that a technician is on the way. Brenda plans the Sunday lamb roast, blissfully unaware of any of it.Tonight's history (all true):Married off to the King of Norway at ten. Her father, her husband and her little son all die — so Margaret picks up Denmark and Norway herself.- In 1389 at Falköping she batters King Albert of Mecklenburg and takes him prisoner — and now she has Sweden too.- In 1397, at Kalmar, she welds the three kingdoms into one and crowns her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania — the very Erik whose bailiffs Engelbrekt would rise against forty years later. She ruled the lot as the "Lady King" until her death in 1412....with two original punk tracks: "Three Crowns" and "Lady King".Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.

Brenda comes back from shopping glowing. She stopped at a gatukök for a Swedish hot dog — a varmkorv — and met a lovely, shy Swedish policeman. She felt a bit wild, so she's invited him to dinner in the cabin tomorrow. The lads slowly realise, with mounting horror, that Mam's new gentleman is Johansson — the very copper they conned last episode.Tonight's history (all true):Queen Christina — daughter of Gustav II Adolf (the real Lion of the North), crowned at five, raised as a prince, brilliant and contrary.- She summoned Descartes for 5 a.m. philosophy lessons in the freezing winter — and he was dead of pneumonia within four months.- She refused to marry, and on 6 June 1654 (the same date they made Gustav Vasa king) she abdicated the throne, converted to Catholicism, and rode off across Europe to Rome — dressed as a man — to live exactly as she pleased....with two original punk tracks: "The Girl King" and "Walk Away".Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.

Brenda's out shopping in Kiruna, so the lads are unsupervised — which is exactly when Konstapel Johansson drives up from Luleå to find out what's wrong with the radio mast and who cut the fence. Deeply uncomfortable in English, he stands no chance against Gaz and Degsy, who blag that they're "ditresta experts" optimising the mast for the Norrland climate.Tonight's history (all true):Engelbrekt, 1434 — a miner from Bergslagen raises the commoners against King Erik's foreign bailiffs, burns the royal castles, and is made captain of the realm at Arboga (traditionally called Sweden's first Riksdag).- Then the betrayal: the nobles can't stand a working man in charge, and in 1436 Engelbrekt is axed to death on a little island in Lake Hjälmaren by the lord Måns Bengtsson....with two original punk tracks: "Engelbrekt" and "Axe on the Island".Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.