The Sven Tapes

Before old age struck me down, I had a friend called Sven who - particularly in the early hours of Saturday night when slightly squiffy - would phone up late night LBC radio phone-ins trying, for some reason, to emulate Sven of Swiss Cottage, who was a friend of the late Peter Cook in the 1980s.

The Sven I knew never gave his location as Swiss Cottage (fearing someone might think him trying to impersonate Cook's friend Sven). Once he was "of Pimlico, but not in Pimlico" because, at time of calling, he was resident in Edinburgh cat-sitting (this was in fact an eleborate storyline Sven deployed to try and explain the otherwise inexplicable Scottish lilt to his broad Norwegian accent).

For reasons we can only put down to gross professionalism on the part of the producer, Sven never got through to Clive Bull, who hosted Mr Cook's friend many a night 20 something years ago. But my Sven found solace, nay, an even better ear in the form of Bill Buckley, whose slot proceeded Mr Bull's, and who was good enough to engage in Svennish conversation ranging from Nina Simone to lorne sausage to Sven's estranged wife Jutta, now a professional boxer living in the US.

This mercifully short slip is the only snippet from the Pimlico vaults which can even start to be described as an inadvertent one liner on the part of Sven:-

http://yourlisten.com/channel/content/103594/Sven_ 

This one meanwhile is, quite frankly, even more a waste of your time, but at least explains how discussion of lorne sausage (with haggis in the centre!) once snuck into a radio chat show on LBC radio

http://yourlisten.com/channel/content/103593/The_Sven_Files