Season finale. At eight o'clock on Monday morning a technician arrives with a skylift to write down whatever he finds on the mast. So the lads spend the last night taking their own gear off it — live on air, one bracket at a time, until the transmitter goes quiet for good.

Tonight's history is Birgitta Birgersdotter. Born into the top of Swedish society around 1303, married off at thirteen, widowed with eight children — and then she starts having visions and writing them down. She sends a king east on a crusade and takes God back off him when it fails. She leaves Sweden in 1349 and never comes home alive. From Rome she dictates seven hundred revelations in Swedish for a prior to turn into Latin, and spends twenty-four years telling four popes in Avignon that they are sitting in the wrong house. One of them she calls worse than Lucifer and more merciless than Judas. Another she tells to his face that he will die if he gets on the boat. He got on the boat.

Meanwhile Brenda finds out where the mast actually came from, and what her sons put in her mouth. Bengt turns up out of uniform. And Sixten writes the shortest report of his career, every word of it true.

They boiled her bones and carried her home over the Alps. It took seven months. The letters were already there.

Contains strong language throughout. The history is fact-checked; the punks are not.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sunday. There's a leg of lamb on, a policeman at the table, and the technician who's writing the report about the mast sitting right next to him. So Gaz hides the microphone in the fruit bowl and broadcasts the dinner — because Monday morning at eight, a skylift arrives.

Tonight's history is the worst thing that ever happened in a Swedish parish. In 1674 two teenagers were hired, paid twenty öre, and stood at the church door at Torsåker to point out the witches among the women walking in to worship. Around a hundred were named. Two hundred children testified, some of them five years old — and their own fathers walked them to the courthouse. On the 1st of June 1675, seventy-one people were led up a hill: sixty-five women, two men and four boys. Beheaded, then burned on three fires, one for each village. One in five of all the women in the parish.

Then a boy pointed at the priest's own wife. She slapped him, and he said he'd got the sun in his eyes. So it could stop. It just had to point at somebody whose husband mattered.

Nobody in that story thought they were the villain. That's the whole point of it. And there is someone at this table who has just worked out that she pointed too.

Every week this show ends with somebody telling the establishment to do one. Not this week — nobody at Torsåker got any last words at all.

Featuring Gaz, Degsy, Brenda Higginbottom, Konstapel Bengt Johansson, and, for the first time, Sixten, who learned his English off Buzzcocks sleeves.

Music: "Sun In Me Eyes" and "Seventy-One".

A memorial stone was raised on Häxberget in 1975. It reads: women died, men judged, the belief of the age comes down on people.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a man standing on the mast. So tonight the whole show is whispered — and then the lads play punk records at full volume through the mast he's standing on.

Which makes them exactly like tonight's king. In March 1792 Gustav III was handed a note at supper telling him he would be killed that night. He went to the masked ball anyway, wearing a mask, a cape — and the shiniest badge in Sweden pinned to his chest, which is precisely what gave him away.

Gaz tells it: the bloodless coup of 1772, the Swedish Academy, the opera house he built and was later murdered in, and the war he wasn't legally allowed to start — so he had his opera tailors sew Russian uniforms and shot at his own border post. Degsy is confidently wrong about coffee. Bengt lies out loud for the first time in twenty-two years and asks for the mast to come down before Monday. And Brenda, out of nothing but pride, tells the technician exactly who they are — then corrects his spelling of Higginbottom.

For once in this series, it was the establishment that told the king to do one.

Contains strong language throughout. The history is fact-checked; the punks are not.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.