Last weekend we were at the movies watching A Royal Affair, a costume drama about duty, passion and betrayal in...Denmark. Great stuff it is too, as the queen strikes up a dangerous liaison with the king's doctor, who seduces her with his Enlightenment views. What is it with Scandinavia these days? It seems to be having its own cultural enlightenment. When I was a kid, the only two Scandinavian cultural products of note were Abba and A-ha. Now you can't move for Scandinavian TV shows (Borgen, The Bridge), movie stars (Mads Mikkelsen, Noomi Rapace) and writers (Stieg Larsson, Camilla Läckburg, Jo Nesbo). Not content with dressing us (H&M) and filling our homes (Ikea), the Scandinavians are dominating our leisure time.
Did the success of Millennium trigger our embrace of all Scandinavian things, or is there something else going on? I have a couple of theories. The first is that the Scandinavians have weathered the recession better than their European neighbours, so they have the time, energy and capital to produce books, screenplays and movies. The second is that the dire economy in the rest of Europe has given us a taste for stories featuring darkness, mist, murder and mud - plenty of which appear in A Royal Affair. Maybe when times improve, we'll want to read sunny tales from Italy and Spain. But for now, Scandinavian gloom suits our mood.
