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VIDEO: Norway fans in awesome Sherlock skit

Two Sherlock-obsessed Norwegian TV executives have cooked up what must be the best parody yet of the BBC's updated Holmes and Watson series. Warning: It's a bit risqué.

VIDEO: Norway fans in awesome Sherlock skit
Vidar Magnussen in the role of Sherlock with Bjarte Tjøstheim in the background. Photo: Screen Grab from YouTube
Their skit, titled 'Oklahomo', riffs on the way the series plays with the question of Holmes' sexuality, while perfectly taking off the quick-fire deduction and verbal brilliance of Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes, all shot with the same jerky camera movements used in the BBC's brilliant production. 
 
Warning: Not safe for work. 

 
The Norwegian 'Sherlock', Vidar Magnussen, who works in the entertainment department at Norway's NRK channel, claims the idea came to him as he was sitting working next to his colleague Bjarte Tjøstheim. 
 
"I sit next to Bjarte, day after day, in the office, and eventually I discovered that he looks a bit like Watson in the series," Vidar Magnussen told Norway's VG newspaper. 
 
The duo then went down to the channel's costume department and played around with wigs and costumes until they achieved a striking similarity to the characters. 
 
Magnussen said he had once been involved with the BBC's Dr Who series while it was being written by Mark Gatiss, Sherlock's creator. 
 
"There I worked with a bunch of talented people, but everyone was absolutely gay," Magnussen said. "Then I thought that there is something about that in the series. We just took it a little further in our skit." 
 
Gatiss, who made his name in The League of Gentlemen,  is in a civil partnership with the actor Ian Hallard. 
 

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NRK

Norway TV flooded with complaints after Eid broadcast

Norway's broadcasting ombudsman has received close to a hundred complaints this week after state broadcaster NRK gave the Muslim Eid celebrations the sort of coverage normally given to Christmas.

Norway TV flooded with complaints after Eid broadcast
The Norwegian journalist Rima Iraki led the Celebration atfer the Fast programme. Photo: NRK
According to Erik Skarrud, the ombudsman's secretary, the organisation received 93 reports after the broadcast of “The Celebration after the Fast” on Sunday night, of which only a handful were positive. 
 
“Someone called it 'propaganda for Islam' and a large number of them used the same sort of expression. There's probably a text somewhere that people are cutting and pasting from,” he told Kampanje magazine.
 
Others complained they “did not want to pay for something that could lead to terror”. 
 
Over 300,000 people tuned in to watch the broadcast, which was helmed by the popular journalist Rima Iraki, the former presenter of NRK's Dagsrevyen news programme. 
 
Eirik Sandberg Ingstad, who led the project, said he felt the experiment, the first such broadcast by a major Western TV channel, had been a huge success. 
 
“We are pretty pleased with it. The response from the audience during and after the broadcast has been overwhelmingly positive, which indicates that we succeeded in creating a party where everyone felt welcome,” he told Kampanje. 
 
 
The controversy prompted Norway's culture minister Abid Raja to write an opinion article, “When can I say 'my Norway'?, on NRK complaining of people's unwillingness to accept Muslim citizens as truly Norwegian. 
 
He said that he himself had fasted on-and-off for Eid all his life, despite “not being the best Muslim in class”, and had found it emotional to see it celebrated by the nation. 
 
“It was a historic event when our public broadcaster, as the first in a western country, dedicated an evening to the celebration of the end of the fast,” he said. 
 
But that feeling had changed to “discomfort” as he learned of the complaints, he said, reminding him of the kind of abuse he received growing up in Norway, and still today as a minister: “You are not a Norwegian. This is not your Norway. Go back where you came from you Muslim bastard, you Paki.”  
 
He said he had always tried not to provoke those who felt only ethnically Norwegian should use the term. 
 
“For many years I lived with a kind of compromise. Instead of calling myself a 'Norwegian', I chose to use the terms 'new Norwegian' or 'brown Norwegian', in an attempt not to provoke people who are put out by me saying 'I am Norwegian',” he wrote.
 
But he said he wanted to change that. 
 
“I was born in Norway, in Oslo, and with the exception of one academic year in Oxford and one working year at the Norwegian Embassy in India, I have lived all my life in Norway,” he said. 
 
“My wife, Nadia, has too. My children are Norwegian. And I want to be buried in Norway when that day comes. From cradle to grave, I am Norwegian.”