INTERVIEW: 'It's a way to jokingly show that Sweden is very segregated'

SVT's new gameshow Invandrare för Svenskar (IFS) began with a simple image on a computer. 

"I wanted to do something to show the simple fact that the category of invandrare [immigrant] is a really stupid category," says Michael Lindgren, the co-founder of the Swedish comedy group Grotesco, and creator of Invandare för Svenskar. 

"I was just playing around with pictures of people with different values and professions and personalities to like, show the multitude of humanity, and then I placed an ethnic Swede in the middle and I built a block of people with different backgrounds around that blonde person. and I was thinking it would be fun to put a Swede in the minority." 

It was only when a friend pointed out that the image he had made looked like the famous quiz game Hollywood Squares, a big 1980s hit in Sweden as Prat i kvadrat, that the idea to turn the image into a game show came about. 

Shortly afterwards, he contacted the show's host, the comedian Ahmed Berhan, and began working with him and some of the other celebrities with immigrant backgrounds on the concept. 

The panelists on Invandrare för Svenskar.

Critics in Sweden are divided over the new gameshow, in which ordinary Swedes have to guess whether celebrity immigrants are lying or telling the truth about their home cultures. 

Karolina Fjellborg, at Aftonbladet, called it a “potential flop”, which was “forced and painfully shallow”. 

"And yet her paper, Aftonbladet, has written about it several times!" Lindgren exclaims when I mention this.  "Some people think it's too stupid and glossy. It's had rave reviews and very critical reviews, which I think is perfect." 

He rejects the charge that the show treats a serious subject in too frivolous a way. 

"I'm an entertainer. I work in comedy. Of course, it's superficial," he says. "It's a glossy game show on the surface, but underneath it's a way to jokingly address the fact that we still think in these categories, that Sweden is a very segregated society, and we need to address that with more honesty."

"The other point is that the idea of 'immigrants' as a group is absurd. It's not a homogenous group. I think Swedes need to be faced with that, that the category is false. 'Immigrants' is useful as a statistical category, meaning people who actually migrated here. Most panelists in the show are born in Sweden, but Swedes tend to see them as immigrants anyway. For how many generations?"

He says his favourite moments in the show come when the contestants are nervous that they might give an answer that reveals them as prejudiced, and you can feel a slight tension, or the few moments when they do make an embarrassing mistake. 

Even though the atmosphere is deliberately kept as warm and light-hearted as possible, it's these flashes of awkwardness, he feels, that reveal how uncomfortable many people in Sweden are about ethnic and cultural differences. 

It's clearly something he thinks about a lot. Unlike immigration to countries like the UK or France, which are the result of long histories of empire, he argues, the immigration to Sweden, at least since the 1970s, has been driven by a sense of Lutheran guilt at the wealth the country amassed as a result of remaining neutral in the Second World War. 

Immigration, he argues, happened too quickly for the ordinary Swedish population to really understand the cultures of those arriving. 

According to Lindgren, the reception of the show has been great. Some of the show's panel have a big following among Swedes with immigrant backgrounds, meaning it is drawing a demographic to Sweden's public broadcaster that it normally struggles to reach. 

"The ambition is that the primary audience for this show is Swedes with mixed backgrounds, Swedes with a background in another country," he says. "It's a very tough demographic to reach. It's a demographic that simply doesn't watch public service, because it's usually not made for them, and they seem to really enjoy it." 

He has plans for the next series to include short factual segments. 

"I'm not saying I'm gonna make it serious. It's supposed to be fun and jokey and entertaining and light, and I'm not going to change it in its core," he says. "But I think it would add to the entertainment and variety to pause maybe twice in the show and say 'this is actually true', just stay at a point of discussion for 30 seconds, and maybe have a graphic to back it up."