I våras disputerade Heidi Svømmekjær vid Roskilde universitet på en mediehistorisk avhandling om tidig dansk radio fram till och med 1950 – betitlad, Radio in Proportion. ‘The Hansen Family’ and strategies of relevance in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation 1925-50. Svømmekjær hävdar i sin inledning att dansk radiohistoria i mångt och mycket återstår att skrivas, och i den meningen fyller hennes avhandling en betydande kunskapslucka. Följer man avhandlingens engelska abstract säger den sig handla om:

In many ways Danish radio history has yet to be written. Although several books have been published by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DBC) and a four-volume edition of Danish media history exists, many central issues remain unexplored. Therefore this thesis focuses on the early public service in the popular spectrum of Danish broadcasting and one case in particular: the popular radio comedy series The Hansen Family (1929-49). This early mass phenomenon is approached as an arena for cultural discussions, national self-representation and early conceptions of the radio medium. Furthermore, it was selected as a representative of the “light” repertoire of the DBC in order to show that and how the corporation revealed paternalistic as well as entertaining tendencies – not only across the radio schedule but also within the single programme (in this case The Hansen Family).

The three main chapters in the thesis are dedicated to the historical/institutional context (chap. 4), different analytical approaches to the series as a whole and a cultural phenomenon (chap. 5), and a close reading of the content of selected episodes (chap. 6). Methodologically, this investigation is positioned between cultural history and media aesthetics with an hermeneutical approach to the content analysis in chapter 6. The primary research material consists of the complete The Hansen Family-episodes from the years 1929, 34, 39, 44, and 49 (approx. 200) as well as press clippings and the 2.5 recordings that remain of the 914 episodes originally broadcast on the DBC.

The central claim is that the DBC managed its public service responsibility by employing, among other things, what I call a “strategy of relevance”. The attempt at making the DBC seem relevant to its listeners is expressed as a “re-proportioning” in The Hansen Family. This is my term for the narrative process by which larger, more abstract societal events are reduced to a domestic scale, thus rendering them more “relatable” to the audience. As a whole, the thesis provides new insights into early Danish radio history as well as a terminology for comprehending some of the narrative mechanisms within the programmes, whilst exploring the role of entertainment programming in a public service context.