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SKAVLAN

‘No boyfriend for me’, Malala tells Skavlan

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenaged education campaigner, has told Fredrik Skavlan, the Norwegian chat show host, that she could never have a boyfriend like other young people in Britain.

Published: 25 October 2013 14:10 CEST
'No boyfriend for me', Malala tells Skavlan
Malala Yousafzai on Skavlan
"Of course not," she answered, when Skavlan pressed her on whether her father allowed her to have boyfriends. 
 
"We must remember that he's a Pashtun father. I can't use a mobile phone. This is first my decision and the decision of my father as well. I can't go to a market without wearing a shawl. I don't have a boyfriend. I can't have a boyfriend." 
 
Ziauddin Yousafzai, who Skavlan invited on stage in the middle of the progamme, explained that "a few things come culturally".
 
"I believe that as a father one should protect one's daughter and one's sons while they are in their teens. Because some teens make bad decisions which they regret their whole life long." 

 
The 16-year-old appeared on the show on Friday night alongside Bianca Jagger and Norway's Princess Märtha Louise.
 
Malala Yousafzai is now living and studying in the UK, where she was treated after she was shot in the head in an attempted assassination organised by the Taliban in retaliation for her campaign for women to be educated in Taliban influenced areas of Pakistan. 
 
Ziauddin Yousafzai, a poet and education campaigner, who has played an important role, both in educating his daughter and in promoting her campaigns, said he had not hot-housed his daughter, as some people have alleged .
 
"People ask me what special training I have given my daughter. I say, 'Do not ask me what I have done. Ask me what I did not do.' As a father I did not clip her wings to fly. Every daughter is made for the stars, let's not clip their wings."
 
 

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GENDER

Sweden ‘obsessed with gender’ complains chat show host

The Norwegian host of Sweden’s leading chat show has complained that the country is “almost obsessed with gender”, after coming under fire for his treatment of women interviewees.

Published: 30 March 2018 11:57 CEST
Sweden 'obsessed with gender' complains chat show host
Fredrik Skavlan is a popular interview in Sweden and Norway. Photo: Monkberry AS
Fredrik Skavlan, whose Friday night chat show on Swedish and Norwegian television pulls in as many as 3m viewers, was sharply criticised earlier this year for asking swimmer Sarah Sjöström in January whether she had a cleaner, with one critic calling the interview “a sexist train wreck”. 
 
The 51-year-old host hit back at the criticism for the first time on Friday in an interview on entertainment journalist Alex Schulman’s podcast. 
 
“My feeling here is that people in Sweden, I’m sorry to say, are almost obsessed with gender in a way that I am not,” he told Schulman. “What’s important to me is to interview people based on who they are, not based on which gender they have.” 
 
Skavlan pointed out that Sjöström has herself stressed that she had not found the question sexist or bullying. 
 
“She herself is being deprived of the power of self-definition because she feels she has not been violated,” he complained. “Then it becomes a bit like ‘Oh, you poor thing, you do not understand how violated you are’. I'm surprised by that. It's a way to ignore her values.” 
 
Asked about the longstanding criticism that he is bad at interviewing women, Skavlan defended himself. 
 
“What do they mean by 'women',” he asked. “Are you talking about Emma Thompson, Malala or Sarah Sjöström. They're just individuals. Should you interview them in some special way? In my book, you shouldn't.”  
 
The Skavlan chatshow is broadcast in Sweden, Norway and Finland, and is frequently shot in London. When English-speaking guests are interviewed, which is often the entire studio discussion switches to English, with Swedish and Norwegian celebrities engaging in English repartee. 
 
When Fredrik Skavlan interviews Swedish-speaking celebrities, he speaks in his native Norwegian, and they reply in Swedish, underlining the close similarity of the two languages. 
 
By pooling audiences in three Scandinavian countries, Skavlan has managed to secure interviews with some of the biggest international politicians, including former US President Bill Clinton, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair,  pop stars such as Bruno Mars, Kanye West and Taylor Swift, and writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Paul Auster. 
 
Although Skavlan said he struggled to see why his Sjöström interview had generated such outrage, he admitted that there had been a “blokey atmosphere” in the studio, with the swimmer coming on alongside two male guests.