Jacob Christensen

Oh dear. What a start.

Okay, I managed to stay clear of the semis and the first hour (so I missed the “spectator” joining the Spanish entry) but the constant stream of sarcastic tweets from all over Europe lured me into the second half. So here are the votes notes of the Danish jury:

• The winning formula for Germany is: The neighbour’s daughter. Kawaii.
• The losing formula for Germany is: Everything else. Especially anything involving irony
• Lena’s “English” was among the most bizarre I have ever heard. And remember that I’m used to hearing Danes abusing the language.
• One of the writers behind the winning entry lives in Århus. The other is American.
• Most women will look good in a black cocktail-dress.
• I have absolutely no idea about how the names of the Danish performers are supposed to be written, yet alone pronounced.
• “Big in Russia” is the new “Big in Japan”.
• Yes, it was a bizarre rip-off of The Police and Army of Lovers. Another victory for the mash-up strategy.
• Having David Miliband perform a tired piece of early 80s pop is not a winning formula.
• The Armenian Angelina Jolie-lookalike was 1.9 m tall? Awesomeness.
• Not all women look good in latex catsuits. The Romanian singer is an exception to this so what the h%€k was she doing sitting behind a piano for most of the performance? What were you thinking?
• Sweden loves the ESC. The ESC does not love Sweden. I wonder what Ingmar Bergman could have made of this.
• There was a Belgian entry?
• Brunettes are in fashion. Even in Russia. I’m definitively not complaining.
• The Turks should have let the robot sing.

And just in case you should get the idea that the Germans are taking it easier when it comes to life and culture these days, I point you to Süddeutsche Zeitung for a thorough discussion of the pros and cons of having Ms Meyer-Landrut representing Tschörmänie.

By the way: Lena’s Satellite wasn’t the first to reach the skies of the ESC. Back in 1979, the talented Ted Gärdestad (whose career was tragically cut short by psychiatric illness) performed this at the ESC. For some reason it was a complete dud back then, but as pop songs go, I actually like it.

“If this were repeated across the country, it would be very messy”. Somehow Monty Python got it right.

Patrick Dunleavy on a more serious note: “Nobody has won in terms of votes, but the last-minute momentum was to Labour”

Other LSE experts weigh in. I particularly like this one:

Charlie Beckett – POLIS Director

In media terms, what have we learnt?

1. That opinion polls during an election campaign are an expression of sentiment, not intention

2. That the TV debates shook up the campaign but they were platforms to perform, not parliaments to decide power

3. That the right-wing newspapers were unable to shift votes significantly, as the Tory share declined over the last month

4. That journalists were right to report the campaign process, but wrong to confuse polls, online memes and TV performance with real politics

Beckett’s comments should be the dashboard of every political journalist’s computer. And I mean every. (Right-wing newspapers play a lesser role in Danish politics but the other three points apply).

Many thanks to Chris Bertram for pointing us to this and to Esben Thomsen for finding a version which fits the template.

Edited: YouTube version of the clip inserted.

Lisa Simpson still has a few tricks to learn, but with a little work on her performance she’ll get there eventually:

HT: PSW.

To be perfectly honest, I have never been much into Swedish crime fiction even if (or because) I lived in that country for nine years. I’ve read the occasional Mankell or Nesser while Stieg Larsson has eluded me completely. Well, Larsson was from Umeå and I didn’t have to read some 1500 pages to find out how people were up there.¹ That leaves the middle Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels as essential readings – in the early ones S+W are testing the waters and the last three read like tracts from what in Sweden is known as the letter-left.

Perhaps my empirically oriented social scientist brain objects to the plots, because – let’s face it: In Scandinavia, the person most likely to kill you is not Dr. Evil but your partner or one of your friends. If you have a psychiatric illness, Danish police will be more than happy to gun you down. Then there are the gang-related shootings and killings but again it is hard to make existential dramas out of those – even though the shoot-out between Yugoslav and Albanian mobsters on a public beach in Göteborg some years ago stand as a bizarre and pretty dangerous high-point.

But to make a long story short, I haven’t followed the dramatisations of the various series of crime stories (do a search and you should find a post about the enfant terrible of Swedish theatre Michael Persbrandt² playing the enfant terrible of Swedish police Gunvald Larsson somewhere in the archives), but yesterday I stumbled upon the British (!) dramatisation of one of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels featuring Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander. I’m not quite sure about the plot and it is very strange hearing people supposed to be from Skåne (which, at least to Danish ears, has the most unintelligible Swedish dialect save Älvdalskan) speaking a perfect Queen’s English. But the cinematography, by Anthony Dod Mantle, is truly and utterly stunning.

Oh, and just to add to the confusion: I watched the show on a Norwegian TV-channel.

1. I know that the Larsson novels aren’t set in Umeå, but as they say: You can take the man out of Umeå, but not Umeå out of the man [↩]
2. Never mind, here he is. [↩]

I’m in no way a football fanatic (and never have been) but I recall discussing the resignation/sacking of Brian Clough as Nottingham Forest manager back in … 1993 with my dad who would never knowingly miss one of the Saturday matches from the English Division I which the Danish TV channel used to screen during the 1970s and 1980s. “I never liked him,” Dad commented, “but Nottingham were brilliant”. To appreciate the comment, you should know that my dad a) had a working class background (what I mean by this is, that problem was not that Clough was somebody with a working class background who had made it) and b) was born and grew up in Vejle. (In case you are clueless about this, look here for explanation).

While The Damned United includes a number of factual inaccuracies, it offers more than a glimpse into the mind of Brian Clough, famous for making lowly Derby a force in English football in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then repeating the feat with Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s and early 1980s and for never becoming England manager. The film is based around Clough’s doomed tenure as Leeds Utd. manager in 1974 which ended with his sacking after a mere 44 days, but the real issue is Clough’s rivalry with former Leeds manager Don Revie and his relationship with his former (and later) assistant Peter Taylor.

Why did Clough have such an issue with Revie? The film claims that Clough felt slighted by Revie when Leeds played Derby in an FA Cup tie years earlier, but I suspect that the real problem was that while both Clough and Revie were groundbreaking in their approach to football managing, their aims were different: Revie wanted to win and did so by meticulously recording the strengths and weaknesses of the opponents – and if it took brute force on the pitch to destroy the opposition, so be it.

Needless to say Clough also wanted to win, but he wanted to win in style. No kicking and rushing here. Passing the ball was his game. Quite an ambitious approach to football when you consider the state of the pitches mudfields available. Strangely, bullying players and talking big, very big, was also part of Clough’s approach to managing a team. But it worked, just as Revie’s approach had worked.

The film? Oh, it’s brilliant. If you have any memories of the 1970s, they are brought back vividly. Everything from the awful wallpapers to the terrible football pitches are there. I even suspect that my dad, had he lived, would have been endeared to Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Clough (while still hating every single inch of the man’s guts). I fear that this Clough would even be able to sell me a used car.

If I should point to a weakness in the storyline, then is it that we never really get an explanation of why the Leeds Utd. board chose Clough as their new manager (it is easy to understand why Clough wanted that job even if a wiser and more self-assured man would have turned the offer down). Pundits have pointed out that the Leeds squad Revie had assembled was nearing its sell-by date in 1974 and needed rejuvenation – Revie in all likelihood knew this which was one reason for his taking the England job – but surely a sensible board would have asked itself what the impact of Clough would be. But then again, Clough was a bit of a hurricane.

That said: You don’t have to have an obsession with football to enjoy the film.

Brian Clough endears himself to the Leeds Utd squad on his first day at work:

And here is a clip from what must surely be one of the most awkward football-related interviews ever. Brian Clough meets … Don Revie in the studio after his sacking (yes, it really happened):

Oh, and is it possible to find a Danish parallel to Brian Clough? As it is, I think so.

Life isn’t too short for French films. Some French films, that is.

Durin the week, I have watched Le gout des autres, directed by and featuring Agnes Jaoui, and L’ennemi public n°1, the second of two films about the notorious criminal Jacques Mesrine starring Vincent Cassel.

Le gout des autres is interesting and worthwhile because it explores human awkwardness without exposing its characters needlessly. It may not be a path-breaking piece of art, but it manages to be reasonably profound and entertaining at the same time. (By the way: Can anyone tell me how the French always manage to come up with attractive actresses who look like real people and not illustrations from a textbook in plastic surgery?)

L’ennemi public n°1 was a disappointment. I actually liked L’instinct de mort, even if Jacques Mesrine is (was) a very problematic character. Like many criminals he was first and foremost a (violent) criminal trying to come up with a justification for his acts. Still: Even if Instinct was much surface and not too much depth, I felt that I got a feeling for Mesrines personality.

After considering the issue for a couple of hours, I think my problem was this: Ennemi is, dramatically speaking, just more (as in: Two hours) of the same. Mesrine doesn’t really develop as a character during the second film. At the same time, the French state (in all likelihood for good reasons) develops a serious grudge against Mesrine with the shooting executed by a division of the police in 1979. It would have been interesting if the second film had turned the perspective and followed the process which led to a decision to kill Mesrine.

But on the other hand that may have been to controversial in France, even after thirty years.

The CNN MUX works now. The wonders of technology.

I realise that I ought to write something profound about the election campaign for the local elections, the confusion surrounding the negotiations about the globalisation funds or perhaps even a review of Niels Krause-Kjær’s biography of Lars Løkke Rasmussen – for professional reviews, look here: 1, 2, 3 – but instead you will be getting an update about my adventures in digital television.

As we all know, Denmark went digital in the big bang style at midnight on 1 November. No more analogue television, three new public service channels and the country-wide introduction of terrestrial subscription tv.

So, how did it go? Well, I have had digital tv since last year when I bought an mpeg2 decoder. The story about setting up a new mpeg4 decoder has been told, but the real excitement was what would happen when one MUX became five.

Strange things happened: I performed a channel search but nothing appeared. Then I tried moving the areal and – whoops – some fifteen channels were added. But there were still some missing. Enter some manual searches and I had the full thirty-five.

But now the problem was that the channels in MUX1 came through nicely when I had the areal in its usual position, but I had to move it to the other side of the tv-set to watch the channels in MUX2. Which meant that I couldn’t watch my old channels. The pay-tv channels appeared when I performed a bit of contortionism in front of the tv-set. Not particularly practical. My assumption was that the areal ought to be closer to the window – but then I needed a longer cable.

Cable found and plugged earlier today. A bit of twisting and turning, and now I have four out of five MUXes working nicely. For some reason the MUX with CNN and the Disney Channel stubbornly refuses to give a decent signal (boo-hoo ). Just to add to the confusion, the tricky MUX is broadcast on channel 27; channels 22, 25, 43 and 49 work.

Anyway: I now have access to more tv than I have had since 2005. But what do you (i.e. I) do with twenty channels? I mean, I had ten from 2005 to 2008 and four from 2008 until now. Oh: Now I know. Listen to a podcast on the AppleTV, that’s what!