When I was growing up, that is when there were only two channels on Swedish TV and when the state had a monopoly of both radio and TV production, public service was such a self-evident concept that it was never even mentioned, much less discussed. Public service was synonymous with a mission of benefit to all: the task of the broadcast media was simply to satisfy the tastes and demands of the majority of citizens. The result was the TV we know from the 1960s and 1970s: weekend entertainment, debate programmes on weekday evenings, science and technology magazines, educational TV, pedagogic children’s programmes and one or two detective and melodrama series. The educational purpose was obvious. It says a great deal about this ambition that several of those comedians who became famous at the end of the 1960s through the medium of TV actually had quite a respectable academic background: Moltas Eriksson, Tage Dani...