I want to give a shoutout to Rosa Mannen (“The Pink Man”), an important figure in the preservation and distribution of obscure Swedish media. He has a large collection of VHS recordings of all kinds of old Swedish television programs (mainly from the public television broadcaster SVT, but also some from other commercial channels), and has been uploading clips from them to his YouTube channel since 2006. Usually it’s just short clips, but sometimes there’s complete episodes of old shows. Of course, most of it is probably only of interest to a Swedish-speaking audience, but among the clips there are many music performances by various artists, both Swedish and international, that can be enjoyed no matter what language you speak.
There doesn’t seem to be any particular structure or order in which he’s uploading clips, he’s apparently just sharing whatever he thinks is interesting. Some of the clips are sorted into channels, but a lot of it is still unsorted, so you’ll usually have to scroll through the whole list of videos and see if you happen to find anything that piques your interest (which can of course be fun in itself!).
Another problem with the channel is that it’s been suspended several times over the years when some copyright holder has complained over some particular clip, but so far it has always been able to come back eventually. Rosa Mannen is doing important media preservation work, but maybe just putting it all up on YouTube isn’t the ideal way to preserve it in the long term (many of his clips have however also been uploaded to the Internet Archive, though apparently not by himself).
Also, don’t let his logo with a Guy Fawkes mask scare you, he’s actually a pretty chill guy, who just enjoys dressing in pink clothes and collecting videotapes. I have read some Swedish interviews with him where he’s talked about his life, interests and motivations for doing what he does, but he’s also said that he wants to remain “a little mysterious” to foreign followers, so I’m going respect that and not share any details.
I want to add that I also have a great deal of respect for SVT, who has an official free streaming service with an "Open Archive" on their website where many of their new and old shows can be streamed. However, many of these programs are only up for a limited time before being replaced with something else, and it’s usually only the “big” and famous shows and series. As an official national public broadcaster, I imagine that SVT is somewhat limited in what it can do in this regard, especially to avoid getting into trouble with copyright holders. Rosa Mannen is far more freewheeling, and a lot of the clips on his channel are things that will probably never get “official” releases, such as live concert broadcasts, one-off, single-episode programs, news broadcasts, or even station breaks.
I have found some important and interesting clips on the Rosa Mannen channel related to video games and computers in general, that have occasionally been useful while researching the games I’ve written about on my blog (most obviously the clip of the game Odens Öga being played in an SVT program), and I know that it will be of use for future blog posts I have planned as well. So here’s my salute to the Pink Man!
