There is one curiosity, though: the sleeker, more fashion-conscious Nyborg has acquired a British boyfriend. It just might do the same for the public-service broadcasting debate. Borgen has already done the impossible by making coalition politics tense and intriguing. The head of news, meanwhile, is struggling with a new boss, a slick young chap imported from cable TV, who is urging more good-news stories and less of the downbeat economic and political stuff.
It’s really just a clunky device for the writers to explain the political background. He and the station’s head of news stand around a podium and discuss the events of the week. Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbæk), a one-time spin doctor and the baby’s father, now sports a foppish hairdo and presents what looks like the most boring politics programme on television. This theme is well thought through in Borgen. Her new press secretary, the TV journalist Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), has had a baby, and the stress-filled scenes in which she tries to juggle her career with motherhood, such as the superbly nuanced bickering between her and her own mother, echo Nyborg’s struggles in the first two series. As the leader of a coalition government, her political convictions were tested and compromised in the last two series, so a new party should give her a blank whiteboard symbolically, it was her first purchase for her shabby headquarters. And, as the writers work on the basis that viewers don’t need everything spelled out, short, snappy scenes filled in the gaps and ended with Nyborg ditching her postpolitics career on the lucrative corporate-speaking circuit and setting up her own party. Two and half years had passed since Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), the most fully realised female TV character in recent years, had been ousted as prime minister at the end of the last series. (Really, we should be nearly fluent by now, there are so many standout Danish imports.) It’s that so much ground had to be made up in the first episode of the third series.
It’s not just the subtitles, although if you miss one you could, unless your Danish extends beyond hej and tak, miss the whole point of a scene. There’s no goofing off on your phone while watching the brilliant Danish political drama Borgen (BBC Four, Saturday).
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