My brother forced me to get download some Top Gear stuff for him (He had been living in England for a while) and, well, bored one day I deceided to check it out to see why he wanted it so badly. After that, google some and found this site
Anyway, car shows.... In Sweden there are actually a few. Currently there are two on air, apart from Top Gear which is also shown although a chopped up version.
The first is
Mera Motor which is decent. Best part of it is usually the history segments where they do a mini documentary on the history of a car maker. The reviews are horrible though. A guy sitting in the car driving along a road at 70km/h talking about one topic at a time. So he will start off with handling, then give the car a grade (from a scale of 1 - 5), then move on to performance, new grade, then interior, new grade, etc
Finishes it all off by adding all the grades and then compare it to grades of similar cars
Then there is
Motorist produced by the government television company and you can tell because no commercially produced program would be allowed to be this bad.
The one episode of this program I could bring myself to watch was basically a 30 minute long segment on how the female presenter went to germany to buy a second hand car. What to watch out for, how to get a bargain etc
Scarily enough though, those are upgrades from the stuff we have had on tv recently. There was
Bosse Bildoktorn. A 30 minute show by a guy in a garage amongst piles of rubish from old cars taking calls from people. Questions where usually of the kind: "I am the owner of a 1986 Volvo estate and my car is having an electrical problem. How can I fix it?". The host would grab some stuff from his piles of junk and go on to explain how the electrical system of a 1986 Volvo works and what could be wrong. Calls like that for the entire show... season after season....
Then there was
Hela K?ret. Dear god.... complete piece of crap. You have a bunch of hosts going to various motorsport events. Not F1 kind of events, you know the kind of race they did in the cheap car challenge in season 7,
this kind. And their main season theme was a driving school for non-licensed drivers who along with their parents were competing for a black trans am. Such utter crap.
But thats not it, there have been more... there was
Autobahn. They started producing this program because another motor show
Motorjournalen was too expensive to produce. Need I say more? The result? Not good, in fact, terrible terrible show produced for like 1? / episode
Motorjournalen was ok, at least until the final season(s), then they started to lose it a bit.
There have been a few more, but those are the most recent ones. As a side note, there was a poll at swedens largest online newspaper
here. If you click on "se resultatet" just below where you can read top gear you can see that Top Gear is by far swedens most popular car show. No wonder we are all here downloading it as well
You know, thinking about it, Sweden is probably THE most unsuccesfull country ever at producing car related tv shows