Found in translation: British actor Freddie Frinton in Dinner for One, which has screened on New Year's Eve in Sweden and Germany every year since 1963. Photograph: HO/EPA
British broadcasting has been so busy of late hoisting the flag of consumer choice that it will soon be something of a rarity to find anyone watching the same programme as you. But whether the future's a bright one of flexibly-delivered, individually-tailored exciting programming or the more likely one of flexibly-delivered, individually-tailored cheap nonsense, it looks like the television's days of being a virtual hearth the whole country could warm themselves by together are numbered.
Not so here in Sweden, where Christmas has finally just come to an end. With its deep-rooted socialist traditions and even deeper-rooted sense of communality, technology in Sweden has tended to bring people closer together rather than ease them ever further apart. In particular, Swedish television and radio still seem more to be an instrument of a paternal state wishing its children instructed and content than the reflection of a diverse population's desire for amusement and information.
You'll understand then that Swedish television is, in the main, dull. At best you could claim the benefit from the lack of arguments over the remote control (there's nothing on the other channel either); at worst, it is direly parochial. Come Christmas time, though, this parochialism comes into its own, serving, in the fading light of the church, in its function of providing a genuine collective focus for national and familial ritual. Two instances in particular are noteworthy.
On December 24 (the main event in Sweden), the hour between 3 and 4pm is given up to reflection on one of Christmas's central mysteries. Far from being the baby Jesus, however, the object of this ritualised collective contemplation is the altogether more babyish figure of Donald Duck. Kalle Anka, as the Swedes know him, for some reason takes pride of place in entitling the hour of classic Disney cartoons, first packaged in 1958 for American audiences as "From All Of Us To All Of You", and broadcast in Sweden virtually unchanged year in, year out.
Beginning with the mesmerising Santa's Workshop from 1932 and featuring classic episodes from Donald, Mickey and a bull, previously unknown to me, called Ferdinand, whose love of wild flowers brings catastrophe to the local bullring, the entire nation watches as one - as my parents-in-law found out when the burglar alarm atrophied one year and the police waited out the full hour before ringing up at 4 on the dot. Clearly, even burglars stop for Kalle Anka.
It is understandable that the best cartoons, which work more like anarchic, gravity-less ballets than stories, can be watched and enjoyed year in year out. Less easily conceivable is the nation's similar attachment to Dinner for One a bizarre English 1920s theatre revue sketch, recorded for television in Germany (where it is also still a great favourite) in 1963. Broadcast in Sweden without fail every New Year's Eve, a good half of the population settle down to watch an upper-class widow who has outlived all her regular birthday dinner companions, and her butler, who must now both serve and stand in for the deceased - and, for reasons of practicality, increasingly drunken - guests when it comes to raising a glass to the birthday girl.
Watch it for the first time, and you'll understand why what is apparently the world's single most broadcast show has never been broadcast in Britain (despite being entirely in English). Indeed, the first time I saw the sketch, my puzzled mirth was directed more at my Swedish hosts than at the act itself. But, with time and perseverance, its benign, unadventurous and moderately coarse humour has worked its way into my blood.
They say to penetrate a country's spirit you must observe its rituals. As the butler makes his way round the dining table, plying his hasty impersonations of the heel-clicking Admiral von Scheider and the garrulous Yorkshireman Mr Winterbottom, he never fails to check whether he should "follow the same procedure as last year". Follow it indeed he should, for the same procedure as last year is, it seems, at the very heart of Swedish Christmas.
