Notes on Danish TV

I recently realized that I’d better write some of these things down before I get completely used to them.

There are a number of things that were surprising to me about Danish TV when I moved here. Probably the most surprising is the porn. Its not like it’s on every channel, but some channels simply play porn. And I’m not talking about soft-focus Penthouse stuff — this is full-on porn. Only between the hours of midnight and six, but still… porn.

We’re talking about perfectly ordinary channels here. Channels you can get with just an antenna. They play porn, instead of say, infomercials. So the porn is accompanied by ads for car lots and the like. So one minute you’re watching porn and the next minute you’re watching a used car salesman.

Another odd thing about Danish TV is that the programming does not necessarily start at the top or bottom of the hour. Some stations do, but it’s not unusual for one show to start at 10, 40, or even 55 minutes after the hour. They seem to simply program each show for however long it runs plus commercials, and start the next one whenever that happens to be.

Television itself is a relatively recent addition to Danish culture. It wasn’t introduced until 1951, and even then it was only for three hours a week and only reached a few hundred homes. Daily broadcasts didn’t start until 1954. The first news program wasn’t introduced until 1965. In contrast, television was introduced in the US in 1928.

It’s pretty obvious that Danes don’t have the same relationship to TV that Americans do. In my experience Danes don’t leave the TV on all the time like many American families do, nor do they often eat in front of the TV. They also don’t think that 40 channels is too few, but that’s about as many you can get in a premium cable package.

Another shock for me was that in order to legally enjoy television, you must buy a “media license”. This is, in my opinion, completely ridiculous. In a country where the top tax rate is 65% — where you can expect to pay fully half of your income in taxes — and where sales tax is 25% across the board, watching over-the-air television is not legal without an extra fee. And it’s not an insignificant amount — it’s about $400 a year.

But, my irritation aside, the reason that the media license is not merely calculated into your taxes is because it hasn’t been considered fair to make everyone pay for access to something that not everyone uses.

In other words, Danes have not historically considered radio, television, and Internet to be universally consumed. (Media licenses are required for all three) This is a little hard to comprehend, especially since Denmark has one of the highest Internet saturation levels in the world: 86% (The US has about 76% saturation.)

The last thing that I think is surprising about Danish television is how much of it is not Danish. Don’t get me wrong, Denmark has a thriving film and television industry, so there’s a lot of original Danish programming, but there are also a lot of American shows and movies that are played (always un-dubbed). The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, for example, is popular here.