GLAD 20 YEARS - Flipbook - Page 16
Entering
the World…
and Zulu
By then, the TV-industry too was zooming in on the little local TV station in North Western Copenhagen. The relatively new youth channel TV Zulu, with cockeyed approaches, did a documentary
series: TV-Glad – A Special TV Station. The eight programmes document a time with few rules and
flourishing ideas and ambitions, and they were there when TV-Glad ventured out to conquer the
world, which of course they had to.
“We were all over the place during the first five years, driven by whatever opportunities we had
amongst ourselves,” says Sven Pors, TV-Glad’s technical magician of eighteen years. “Someone had
connections in Central America and spoke Spanish, and making a complicated story simple, TV-Glad
ventured out to produce inclusive TV all over the world.”
“Naive perhaps, but the idea was to broadcast all over the world via satellite. Among other places,
we went to Ecuador, and visited Cuba twice. Zulu joined us in Cuba once. It was crazy. It was happygo-lucky, even the things we thought we had well-planned. But it worked. In those days, out of sheer
necessity, we took things in our stride. In Ecuador, we had to stay in door for a full day, because of a
local uprising. Another time, an employee didn’t make the flight home because he’d taken sleeping
pills and had fallen asleep in the loo. He arrived the following day.”
Sven Pors concedes that this could have created severe panic for some of the employees. “As
it happened, it was people like ‘Red Jan’ and Vivi, and they were cool about it. Today we’d do things
differently. But it was fun,” he says.
Actually, TV-Glad succeeded in having the programmes translated into Spanish and broadcast
via satellite, and quite bizarrely, they could be viewed all over South America and far up into Finland.
Zulu’s programmes were broadcast in 2002, and many Danes got an insight into the vision behind
TV-Glad.
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