Brenda comes back from shopping glowing. She stopped at a gatukök for a Swedish hot dog — a varmkorv — and met a lovely, shy Swedish policeman. She felt a bit wild, so she's invited him to dinner in the cabin tomorrow. The lads slowly realise, with mounting horror, that Mam's new gentleman is Johansson — the very copper they conned last episode.

Tonight's history (all true):

• Queen Christina — daughter of Gustav II Adolf (the real Lion of the North), crowned at five, raised as a prince, brilliant and contrary.
• - She summoned Descartes for 5 a.m. philosophy lessons in the freezing winter — and he was dead of pneumonia within four months.
• - She refused to marry, and on 6 June 1654 (the same date they made Gustav Vasa king) she abdicated the throne, converted to Catholicism, and rode off across Europe to Rome — dressed as a man — to live exactly as she pleased.

...with two original punk tracks: "The Girl King" and "Walk Away".

Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brenda's out shopping in Kiruna, so the lads are unsupervised — which is exactly when Konstapel Johansson drives up from Luleå to find out what's wrong with the radio mast and who cut the fence. Deeply uncomfortable in English, he stands no chance against Gaz and Degsy, who blag that they're "ditresta experts" optimising the mast for the Norrland climate.

Tonight's history (all true):

• Engelbrekt, 1434 — a miner from Bergslagen raises the commoners against King Erik's foreign bailiffs, burns the royal castles, and is made captain of the realm at Arboga (traditionally called Sweden's first Riksdag).
• - Then the betrayal: the nobles can't stand a working man in charge, and in 1436 Engelbrekt is axed to death on a little island in Lake Hjälmaren by the lord Måns Bengtsson.

...with two original punk tracks: "Engelbrekt" and "Axe on the Island".

Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charles XII: the teenage warrior king who couldn't lose — until he lost everything. Gaz and Degsy tell it, and Degsy's mam Brenda is still here, mothering the memory of a 36-year-old who never came home.

Tonight's history (all true):

• Narva, 1700 — the fifteen-year-old king routs a Russian army of nearly forty thousand with eight thousand men, in a blizzard.
• - Poltava, 1709 — he marches into Russia, Peter the Great burns everything, the army freezes, and the empire is broken in a single day.
• - Five years hiding in the Ottoman Empire, a fortnight's ride home, and then a bullet through the head in a Norwegian trench in 1718, aged 36 — and to this day, nobody knows who fired it.

...with two original punk tracks: "Narva" and "Shot in the Dark".

Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Degsy's mam, Brenda Higginbottom, has somehow reached the Arctic on mother's instinct — and she is NOT impressed. As Gaz and Degsy try to broadcast the story of the Swedish Vikings who went east, Brenda barges in with a fry-up and no respect whatsoever for live radio.

Tonight's history (all true, however loudly interrupted):

• The Varangian Guard — in 988, Emperor Basil II takes six thousand Viking hard-lads as his personal bodyguard.
• - Miklagård — what the Norse called Constantinople, reached by rowing east down the rivers.
• - Halfdan — a bored Varangian who carved his name in runes inside the Hagia Sophia. Still there a thousand years on.
• - Ingvar the Far-Travelled — the great expedition east that never came home, remembered on runestones across Sweden.

...with two original punk tracks: "Miklagård" and "Proper Breakfast".

Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two foul-mouthed British punks, Gaz and Degsy, have broken into a cabin outside Kiruna, cut the fence to a radio mast, and gone on air. In the pilot they blast through the birth of modern Sweden — getting drunker, and louder, as they go.

Tonight's history (all true, however badly told):

• Gustav Vasa — the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520, the flight to Dalarna, the Mora skiers, and the day in 1523 Sweden told Denmark to do one.
• - Nils Dacke — the 1542–43 Småland uprising against the punk-turned-king.
• - The warship Vasa — the grandest ship in the world, sunk after 1,300 metres in 1628. Too posh to float.

...with three original punk tracks along the way: "Do One (Vasa's Comin')", "Dacke's Army" and "Too Posh to Float".

Contains strong language. An AI-generated production: voices and music made with AI, history fact-checked by hand.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.