Iceland review - 2007, Qupperneq 57

ICELAND REVIEW 63
attention. It’s important because it’s something we know, something
that is relevant to us,” explains Helga Thorberg, f lorist, actress and
host of Klipptu kortid. Randver Thorláksson, comic actor and host of
Randver, is also dissatisf ied with the bread-and-circus programming
broadcast by Iceland’s other networks. “We have become so used to
American culture, which is not good. It’s not our culture,” Thorláksson
complains. “I find American programming too stupid to watch. Those
shows with a fat, dumb guy married to a smart, sexy woman, like King
of Queens, are put on us all the time and those terrible reality shows.
You are trapped in it like a soap opera – it’s a drug.” Ólína Thorvardar-
dóttir, a veteran of television media, school administration, and civic
politics who hosts Mér finnst, has her own theories about the toll this
sort of cultural imperialism takes on a small nation like Iceland. “As
every other civilized nation nowadays we are occupied with global-
ization,” explains Thorvardardóttir. “But it’s not healthy for a nation
to forget itself in this trend.” She believes it is important to create a
space “in our Icelandic environment having Icelandic debates on Ice-
landic issues with other Icelandic people.” She continues, “You have
this globalization trend, which is f ine. But we can’t all jump onto the
same side of the boat in that sense. We’ll f lip over!”
But this question of how much Iceland pipes in from abroad and
how much is drawn from its own cultural wells is no new question –
even the issue of what Iceland’s rabbit ears should and shouldn’t be
tuning in to is as old as the medium itself.
elevision will eventually make radio as obsolete as the
horse – and empty all the nation’s movie houses. Children
will go to school in their own living rooms, presidential
candidates will win elections from a television studio […] Housewives
are the greatest worry. Will they have time to sit down and watch
television?” This was the prophecy espoused in a full-page editorial
from a 1948 edition of Morgunbladid, Iceland’s daily paper. Some of
these predictions hold water today, but ask any Icelander for their
litany of concerns about television and you’ll be hard pressed to find
stealing the good housewife away from her chores. However, the birthright
of Icelandic television is inextricably linked to the greatest concern the
nation has ever had (and still has) about the medium: should Icelanders
be watching first and foremost Iceland on their TV screens?
Back in 1948 this proposition verged on absurdity: producing programm-
ing exclusively for a population of just over 135,000 people – a viewership
about the size of modern-day Fargo, North Dakota. But it wasn’t until
the threat of foreign programming entered the picture that Icelanders
took the proposition seriously. In 1955 the US Naval Air Station in
Kef lavík, 55 kilometers west of Reykjavík, decided to begin broad-
casting American programming. The signal was strong enough that it
could be picked up in the Reykjavík area, so anyone with a set became
the envy of their neighbor. But dissent was brewing. By 1964 opposition
came to a head and a petition was delivered to parliament demanding
that the Americans’ broadcast be limited to the base. The petition was
signed by several notables of the time including Nobel laureate for
literature Halldór Laxness, the rector of the university, the national
conservator, professors, writers, composers and other revered minds.
For the first time, Iceland stated it would only have its own, or none
at all. In 1965 Sigurdur Líndal, secretary to the supreme court, deli ve-
red his Cassandra speech at the university, stating that the most daunting
problem facing the Icelandic people is that “a foreign empire… [has]
managed to slink into Icelandic society through the most effective
propaganda tool of the modern age”: the television. He forebodes a
fate in which Icelandic society would be stripped away and the people
assimilated into American mass culture. Some might even argue that
Líndal’s prediction wasn’t too far from the truth.
In response to these worries the base’s broadcast was finally limited,
and on a chilly fall evening in 1966, RÚV, the national broadcasting
service, began its television transmission and the island saw its f irst
native broadcast. On September 30 at 8 p.m. Prime Minister Bjarni
Benediktson sat for a Q&A session with the Icelandic press, followed
by the documentary about the Icelandic settlers in Greenland, and
then Skáldatími (The Poet’s Hour), which saw Halldór Laxness reading
from his latest novel, Paradise Found. Programming emphasized
Icelandic content with broadcasts two nights a week, then later, six.
Thursday nights there was no TV. And never in July. In fact, it was not
until 1983 that programming was delivered year round and not until
1987 that the state broadcasting network began Thursday programming,
and only then because of competition from the nation’s f irst private
channel, Stöd 2.
Today there are two Icelandic channels broadcast to the public (three
if you count the Christian televangelism network, Omega), plus a handful
of private channels like Stöd 2 and the sports channel Sýn. With the
dawn of cable many households have nearly 80 channels now – MTV,
CNN, Cartoon Network, E! Entertainment, Zone Reality, etc. – all
broadcast from overseas or featuring foreign programming, with the
exception of one. ÍNN has entered the arena and is vying for the nation’s
primetime attention under the righteous banner of local-grown pro-
gramming. At the bustling table of the evening television lineup, some
believe that Icelanders have become so culturally anemic that they will
indeed choose to eat the Brussels sprouts of local programming instead
of the super-sized American export sitcoms and reality shows.
“T