It’s official. Swedish TV is pants. With Malmö hosting the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, its national channels have been drastically cutting back to help fund it, and we might have to put up with this dearth until 2014.
They haven’t had anything decent to watch in Pavlopetri for … 3,000 years. The ancient Greek city has the dubious honour of being the world’s oldest submerged archaeological town site and is now the subject of the BBC doc City Beneath the Waves: Pavlopetri.
It would be tough selling that one to kids, but no doubt some of the sharks in Consuming Kids (DR2, Mon 23:10) would be able to convince Junior he needs to persuade his parents to take him scuba diving off the Peloponnese. American kids are the most powerful consumer demographic in the world, and this doc lifts the lid on the buttons the moneymen push to make them want more and more candy.
But it’s not just kids. Just ask the subjects of Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook (DR2, Sat 20:01) and Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippie (DR2, Sat 20:45), two geeks who have changed our world forever.
Talking of which, the film nerds among you might want to record Cameraman – The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (DRK, Tue 10:15), a doc about the legendary cinematographer who shot most of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic movies, providing you can shake off your student union hangover to get up that early.
Elsewhere, Pedigree Dogs Re-Exposed (SV2, Sun 22:10) is an alarming doc about British dog breeding; rewatch the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Concert (BBC Ent, Sat 21:00) and the epic first series of Game of Thrones (TV3, Tue 21:00); TV3 Puls is screening two British festive cookery programmes: Gordon’s Christmas Cookalong with David Hasselhoff and Russel Grant (a fat astrologer big again thanks to his country’s love of dance shows) and Heston Blumenthal’s In Search Of Perfection: Christmas Special (Tue 20:00); and Blind Flight is a compelling 2004 TV drama about the kidnapping of Brian Keenan and John McCarthy – two men gone so long, Generation X thought they’d never see them again.
