My fourth Swedish journal entry was written aboard m/s Sjöbris this morning as it navigated the deeps and shallows of Stockholm’s Norra Skärgård en route for Östernå. Blidösundsbolaget have managed to keep going with the help of a 3000-strong fan club and some shrewd wheeling and dealing in the Skärgård Steamboat Market dominated by Vaxholmsbolaget…and immortalised in song by the Swedish Troubadour Evert Taube.

Back in the 80s & 90s Alan Pryke would research, produce and present his own music programmes for Radio Sweden International. One week he had the legendary Stockholm Blues Man Roffe Wikström on his scripting board. Rolf still turns out several times a year for Blidösund’s programme of Music Cruises but Alan’s RSI Wikstrom Show has vanished into the cellars of Radiohuset along with his Benny Anderson, Björn Ulvaeus and Robert Wells shows.

Sweden is a small country with a population of between nine and ten million. But outside of Sweden…in Finland and Minnesota for instance…there are as many Swedish-speakers. Beyond this linguistic enclave there is an English-Speaking Swedish Diaspora of several times this size gathered in the great world cities like Sydney, Johannesburg, New York and Los Angeles. These are the direct descendents of Swedish Settlers who emigrated under great hardship in the 19th century and then by choice in the 20th to make a better life for their children. But this is not the whole story.

Sweden punches well above her weight on the global stage…and has done so for many decades. The success of The Swedish Model is part of the story. But Sweden’s Neutrality Diplomacy and her Human Rights Agenda in Foreign Affairs…long before the failure of the British Labour Party dissident socialist Robin Cook to implant the heresy amidst the imperial culture of the British Foreign Office…have also earned Sweden many international admirers.

Sweden’s World Broadcasting Service has only ever had a tiny fraction of the resources of the BBC World Service. But Sweden’s influence as an English Language World Broadcaster during the 50-years of the Cold War was out of all proportion to its size. Most World Listeners regarded world services as Lord Haw-Haw style propaganda exercises...with suspicions about BBC Bias steadily mounting since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. But Sweden has always been trusted. Indeed this non-bias ran so deep that even Swedish politicians rarely intervened.

Small budgets allowed producers at Radio Sweden International to introduce innovations in style, substance and format that might take decades to permeate through the top-heavy hierarchies of the BBC. Alan Pryke invented the Music Documentary with his ABBA programmes in the 1980s two decades before the BBC starting commissioning Outside Production Companies to prepare this ear food for evening listening at peak time on BBC Radio Two.

Programme formats like Andrew Marr’s Start of the Week, Libby Purves’ Midweek and Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time were features of Radio Sweden’s short-wave broadcasts…spliced into home-spun imitations of Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America or Roy Plomley’s Desert Islands Discs. Indeed 20 years before John Peel took his microphone out of the studio for the BBC’s Home Truths Alan Pryke was doing Home Truths for Radio Sweden International.

Unnoticed too has been Alan Pryke’s political interviews. In an age of the Rottweiler Interview of a Brian Redhead, John Humphries, Jeremy Paxman or Jonathan Ross and the Talk Show Approach of a David Frost, Jimmy Young, Michael Parkinson or Channel Four’s Richard & Judy, Alan Pryke’s interviews with up-and-coming politicians like Anna Lindh have a style that blends respect with curiosity and tempers scepticism with affection for the values that the Swedish politician bring to public life…consensus, cooperation, fairness, equality, decency and common courtesy.

From 1984 to 1990 Anna headed up Sweden’s Young Social Democrats and from 1991 to 1994 she chaired the board of Stockholm City Theatre and was Stockholm City Commissioner for Culture and Leisure. She was a close friend of three powerful Social Democrat Women…Birgitta Dahl, Margot Wahlström, and Mona Sahlin. Today you will find her body in Stockholm’s Katarina Kyrka…Catharine’s Church. Nearby lies the body of an inheritor of Carl-Michael Bellman’s mantle Cornelius Vreeswijk who died in 1987 at the young age of 50. Anna Lindh was assassinated on the second anniversary of 9-11 at the age of 46. Her real killers have not been brought to justice…nor have Petra Kelly’s.