Sweden–United Kingdom relations

Air transport

Both the UK and Sweden are part of the Single European Sky, hence there are no restrictions between both countries to operate flights to. Both flag carriers British Airways and SAS between them fly between the capital's major airports of London-Heathrow to Stockholm-Arlanda, SAS also flies from Arlanda to Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh. BA and SAS also flies between Heathrow and Gothenburg airports, with SAS providing connections to other parts of the country.

Other carriers that fly between the UK and Sweden include both regional and low-cost carriers.The regional carriers that fly between UK and Sweden are Sun-Air which flies from Gothenburg to Manchester, and flybmi from Gothenburg to Bristol and Birmingham.

Low-cost carriers are well established between the UK and Sweden, Norwegian flies from London-Gatwick, Edinburgh, Manchester airports to Arlanda and Gatwick to Gothenburg, with connections to other airports in Sweden. easyJet also flies from Gatwick to Arlanda, plus seasonally to Åre Östersund for skiing and winter holidays. Ryanair flies between London-Stansted to Stockholm-Skavska, Stockholm-Västerås & Gothenburg, with Gothenburg-City, Malmö and Skellefteå airports in the past. Enter Air offers seasonal charter flights to Kiruna from eleven British airports.

BA, SAS, Norwegian, Primera Air, easyJet and Ryanair all fly to nearby Copenhagen airport in Denmark from various British airports, which has easy access by the Öresundståg and SJ trains to Scania and Småland.

Marine transport

In the past, there were regular ro-ro ferries between Gothenburg and Newcastle, Harwich, Immingham and Hull done by Tor Lines, England-Sweden Line and Scandinavian Seaways using such ferries as the MS Tor Britannia and MS Tor Scandinavia. The plot of the BBC soap Triangle involved on a ferry between the Harwich and Gothenburg route. Popularity of travelling by ferry over the North Sea fell with advent of lost-cost carriers and speedy catamaran services between Harwich and Hook of Holland and cross-channel services. Currently commercial port services for freight exist between Harwich and Immingham to Gothenburg.

Literature

Major British authors both historical and contemporary literature such as William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter, Charles Dickens, J. R. R. Tolkien & J. K. Rowling are all popular in Sweden. Due to the high literary knowledge of English language, many popular works are available and read in their original text as well as translated versions. Around ten British authors including Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Harold Pinter and the current winner Kazuo Ishiguro have all won the respected Nobel Prize in Literature which is awarded by the Swedish Academy. One British-Irish laureate George Bernard Shaw, used his prize money to help set-up and run the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation,^[5] a foundation which helps literate links between the UK and Sweden.

On the other hand, historical Swedish literature is quite small in the UK. The reason is that the UK is much more historically linked to literature in Central and Southern Europe such as France and Italy and knowledge of Swedish language is not widely known. However, in the last thirty years. there has been a big interest in Swedish crime thrillers which put the under category of Scandinavian noir, like Henning Mankall's Kurt Wallander series, Camilla Läckberg and the famous Stieg Larsson and his Millennium series. Sweden encourages English translations of its literature through an organisation The Swedish-English Literary Translators’ Association ^[6] which provide grants to assist this.

Press

Both the UK and Sweden are notorious literary readers with high readership of newspapers and magazines. The strength of British news and corporate affairs in Sweden, means that many major publications have a British correspondent including Dagens Nyheter, Göteborgs-Posten & the news agency TT. On the other hand, there aren't any British resident correspondents in Sweden and the nearest is the Financial Times' Nordic correspondent who is based in Norway. British media is more highly reliant on special roving correspondents and the TT news agency to give them the news.

Due to small size of the local market and the high level of literacy of English, many British magazines in a wide range of subjects are available in Swedish newsstands like Pressbyrån.^[7] On the other hand, it is very difficult to purchase Swedish publications in the UK due to near zero knowledge of the Swedish language. The only regular publication of a Swedish language magazine is the Swedish Church's quarterly magazine Kyrkobladet .^[8]

One highly notable exception to the Swedish press corp, is the English-language Swedish online tabloid The Local. This news-site which was started as a weekly e-mail in 2004 by two British expats Paul Rapacioli & James Savage. It has now morphed into the recognised news-site and it is often quoted aboard.

Radio and television

Although it is not apparent initially, Swedish broadcasting is heavily influenced by the UK. The public broadcaster Sveriges Radio (SR) started in 1932, copying the British model of the time of a commercial-free national public broadcaster the British Broadcasting Corporation which was found in 1926 funded by an annual user licence. Although this set-up has changed hugely over time, the basic set-up remains the same of a commercial-free national public broadcaster of SR, Sveriges Television (SVT) and Sveriges Utbildningsradio (UR) paid for by a per household television licence fee. Both the UK and Sweden work together in the ETSI, EBU and the European Union, in developing the standards of broadcasting in both countries including the DAB, DVB and IPTV.

The UK was also influential in satellite broadcasting as well, which help establish commercial television in Sweden. The first commercial broadcasting channels such as the Super Channel, the Children's Channel and Sky Television was free-to-air and unencrypted in both countries and establish a rival to the national broadcaster SVT. When British Satellite Broadcasting and Sky Television merged to form BSkyB, BSB's old satellite Marcopolo were sold off to Nordic Satellite AB, which turned leases space from the renamed Thor 1 satellite to help created TV3, Sweden's first commercial broadcaster. Due to legal restrictions in advertising, TV3 started to be "broadcast" from its London headquarters, and even today all of the channels of TV3's parent company Viasat are broadcast from the UK despite rules on commercial broadcasting are much more relaxed then in the past. This leads to an unusual situation where advertising on the service is regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority of the UK and not the domestic regulator, Reklamombudsmannen. TV3's broadcasting from London is also noted, as it helped start the career of British-based Swede Ulrika Jonsson as one of her first jobs in television was a weather forecaster for the channel.

The UK and Sweden both active are in the field of international broadcasting. In radio, the English language service of the BBC World Service is available in Sweden by satellite on the Hotbird 13B.^[9] The BBC's own Swedish-language service was shutdown in March 1961. The week-daily English-language programme Radio Sweden made by SR International^[10] on Eutelsat 9A, and was earlier syndicated on WRN which is available on Sky and WRN's website. The programme itself is run by a mixture of Swedes and a number of Britons including Richard Orange and Loukas Christodoulou.^[11] All the services are available to be streamed on their respective websites of the BBC and SR, and available as a podcast libraries such as iTunes.

For television, the BBC World News, is available in Sweden on many platforms including, BoxerTV, Viasat and Com Hem. Other BBC's channels including BBC Earth, BBC Lifestyle and BBC Knowledge channels which plays a mixture of programmes from the BBC's archive are available on various Swedish satellite, cable and IPTV services. For Swedes living in the UK, until 2017 they had access to SVT's international channel SVT World on Eutelsat 9 and IPTV. Currently they have access to a limited selection of programmes on the on-demand service on SVT Play. On the other hand, people in Sweden cannot access the BBC's on-demand service iplayer as it is completely geo-blocked.

Many British television formats, especially reality television, have been broadcast in Sweden, including Pop Idol (Idol), The X Factor (X Factor), I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! (Kändisdjungeln), MasterChef (Sveriges mästerkock), The Great British Bake-Off (Hela Sverige bakar) & The Supersizers go… (Historieätarna). Sweden also unusually copies a radio format, in the popular comedy radio show Just a Minute (På minuten). The only time a Swedish format was brought over to the UK was Expedition Robinson (Survivor UK), although there have been suggestions of Melodifestivalen being brought over to improve British chances to win the Eurovision Song Contest.

Various British TV shows are shown on Swedish public and commercial television including drama such as Downton Abbey and Happy Valley, comedy such as Keeping Up Appearances (Skenet bedrar), soap operas Emmerdale (Hem till gården) and documentaries such as Blue Planet. Programs are generally subtitled, except programs aimed at children. Much of this is due to cost of making programming is high in Sweden, and it often convenient to import programming from abroad.

The phenomenon of Nordic Noir has led a number of Swedish dramas been broadcast on British television, including Bron (The Bridge) and Wallander. Wallander is noted, that a British version of the program exists, consists of a British cast that is filmed in Sweden. The Swedish Christmas classic Sagan om Karl-Bertil Jonssons julafton (Christopher's Christmas Mission) was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1987, with Bernard Cribbins being the narrator with associate English dubbing. The popular, but unheard British farce of Dinner for One (Grevinnan och betjänten) has been broadcast on SVT for over thirty years.