Editor's Note: Listen to Borgen: Outside the Castle from Monday 16 December at 2.15pm
The project
In 2010 I was working as a radio drama director-in-residence at DR in Copenhagen. I was in a planning meeting and the discussion moved from new ideas to how to create compelling soundscapes on radio.
We talked about the fact that shows on the radio often move on to become TV shows and that it can give the show a boost as the audience can now see the characters they’ve heard on radio. We wanted to see if it would work the other way round. Could radio add something to a TV show?
Radio can struggle to convey the environment in which the action talks place but if the listeners have already seen these surroundings on television, simple sounds could create a strong image. Listeners would recognize the sounds and create elaborate sets in their heads - see the narrow hallway, the dirty kitchen and so on.
At that time, the family drama Sommer was the Sunday night show on TV in Denmark and we made arrangements for the final season of that show to be done solely for radio. That proved very successful as the listeners knew the characters and their surroundings well. So when TV Drama was developing Borgen, we decided to do a radio spin-off to be aired simultaneously with the first season of the TV series using the same music, sounds and following the same developments in Danish politics. Obviously both series would have to be able to stand on their own but we had to take care, for example, that we didn’t kill someone on radio creating trouble for the TV or vice versa. We decided that the radio series would concentrate on the civil servants at Borgen (the nickname for the Danish parliament building) whilst the TV series focused on the politicians. So the two shows would complement each other but not interfere with each other too much. And it was very successful.
Working in England
When I learned that Borgen was popular in the UK, I brought the idea of the radio spin-off to Radio Drama at the BBC. I trained as a director in London and have always felt very close to England and still come here as often as possible. I feel that the British and the Danish have much in common and share a taste in radio and TV. We both have a droll and dark sense of humour and British television does very well in Denmark. I developed the idea with Radio Drama discussing how we would create an image of Denmark in a British radio drama piece. Should the actors speak in Danish accents and so on? In the end we decided to use Danish music and sounds but have the actors speaking in a British idiom as you would in a piece by Chekhov.
Susannah (Katherine Dow Blyton) warns Environmental campaigner, Nick (Will Howard).
Coffee
I’m often asked about the many so-called ‘coffee meetings’ that appear in Borgen. In Denmark we have eight political parties represented in the parliament and the government is always a coalition between parties. Negotiations are a necessary part of passing a bill. No single party has a majority so the party in government needs the support of other parties. Therefore they have these ‘coffee meetings’, unofficial meetings where parties can lobby and get a sense of each other’s intentions.
Jan Gleerup is a hard-drinking journalist, played by Tom Goodman Hill.
Recently a new budget was in negotiation and Enhedslisten, a left-wing party supporting the government, would not agree to the budget. At the eleventh hour the Minister of Finance closed the budget using support from the opposition. This created a tense situation as Enhedslisten could withdraw their support from the government and force a general election. But who’d win? Would that mean they’d lose the power of negotiation with a new Prime Minister?
Author photograph courtesy of Natascha Thiara Rydvald
Listen to Borgen:Outside the Castle
