This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the last Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV edition. The theme is shows not in English, which is a tough one for me since I don't watch much episodic TV and definitely not foreign-language episodic TV. So I went with a more reality theme this time out:
Norwegian "Slow TV" (2009-present). In 2009, Norway's NRK TV came up with a programming idea that became a surprising hit in the country and made the news around the world. In the first edition, NRK put several cameras on the train from Bergen to Oslo, a seven-hour journey, and just let the cameras roll, as you can see above.
Aktuelle Kamera (1952-1991). East Germany's nightly news program, giving East Germans their nightly dose of propaganda. Luckily for most East Germans however, there was a transmitter in West Berlin broadcasting the West German channels so most East Germans (Dresden all the way in the southeast was the one big exception) could receive West German TV as well. The above is an extract from June 25, 1983; below is a full episode from May 1, 1989:
Melodifestivalen. Sweden's annual show to select the country's entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, an event that might not have been so well known to most Americans until the Will Ferrell movie from earlier this year. For most of the first 40 years of the competition, with the exception of a few years in the mid-1970s, countries were required to field entries sung in their official language (or, in the case of countries with multiple official languages, one of them; I believe Belgium and Switzerland have a policy of rotating which language is selected for their entry). 1974 was one of the years that everybody could sing in English, but in the national competition, we can see songs sung in the original language. Gotta love Björn's silver boots!
3 comments:
I LOVE, LOVE, LoVE ABBA...Not shouting, just excited...hahahaaa. I remember so well when the Berlin Wall came down as it was quite emotional for my mom who escaped(not in Berlin but still from East to West). I still recall my mom receiving a letter from my great Aunt, Her Tante Lisbett, who still lived in Wittenberg(hour south of Berlin). She was so excited in finally being allowed to get a small fridge, because, she had to prove she deserved one. Funny, I just watched a show on scenic railways and they talked about this route. They have to have cameras on this because there is truly only one line and if the train gets stuck because of the snow, the well regulated railway system know what is going on.
I was in West Germany visiting my relatives in the Summer of 1989, which was a very interesting time.
Earlier in the spring, Hungary was liberalizing and opened up a new border crossing with Austria. East Germans couldn't travel to the West but it was somewhat easier for people in the Eastern Bloc to get visa to other Communist countries, so any number of East Germans went to Hungary and crashed the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new border crossing and escaped into Austria.
The East German authorities obviously cut off visas to Hungary, which also had the effect of leaving a bunch of East Germans in Czechoslovakia. Those East Germans responded by flooding onto the grounds of the West German embassy in Prague, and their tent city was a huge story that entire summer. I found this extract from an August 1989 edition of West Germany's Tagesschau (in German, of course) dealing with the story.
Oh Abba! I actually went to the Abba museum last year when I was in Stockholm 😂
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