Alan Gordon started his radio career with Rado Sweden International in Stockholm in the 1970s. At Radiohuset he would research, produce and present his own music programmes for more than two decades, building programmes around his own interviews or those acquired from other journalists. One week it would be Benny Anderson or Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA. Another week such legends as Robert Wells or the Stockholm Blues Man Roffe Wikström who still peforms several times a year on Blidösund’s Jazz Cruises in the Stockholm Archipelago. One of Alan Gordon's unfulfilled ambitions is to get Paul McCartney in the studio with Benny Anderson to discuss The Art of Fine Songwriting.

Sweden is a small country with a population of less than ten million. But outside of Sweden,in Finland and Minnesota for instance,there are as many Swedish-speakers. Beyond this linguistic enclave there is an English-Speaking Swedish Diaspora of several times this size gathered in the great world cities like Sydney, Johannesburg, New York and Los Angeles. These are the direct descendents of Swedish settlers who emigrated under great hardship in the 19th century and then by choice in the 20th to make a better life for their children. But this is not the whole story.

Sweden punches well above her weight on the global stage…and has done so for many decades. The success of The Swedish Model is part of the story. But Sweden’s neutrality diplomacy and her human rights agenda in foreign affairs -long before the failure of the British Labour Party dissident socialist Robin Cook to implant the heresy amidst the imperial culture of the British Foreign Office - have also earned Sweden many international admirers.

Sweden’s world broadcasting service has only ever had a tiny fraction of the resources of the BBC World Service. But Sweden’s influence as an English Language world broadcaster during the 50-years of the Cold War was out of all proportion to its size. Most world radio listeners regarded world services as Lord Haw-Haw style propaganda exercises - with suspicions about BBC bias steadily mounting since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. But Sweden has always been trusted. Indeed this non-bias ran so deep that even Swedish politicians rarely intervened.

Small budgets allowed the small team of media professionals at Radio Sweden International to introduce innovations in style, substance and format that might take decades to permeate through the top-heavy hierarchies of the BBC. Alan Gordon invented the Music Documentary with his ABBA programmes in the 1980s two decades before the BBC starting commissioning outside production companies to prepare this ear food for evening listening at peak time on BBC Radio Two.

Programme formats like Andrew Marr’s Start of the Week, Libby Purves’ Midweek and Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time were features of Radio Sweden’s short-wave broadcasts - spliced into home-spun imitations of Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America or Roy Plomley’s Desert Islands Discs. Indeed 20 years before John Peel took his microphone out of the studio for the BBC’s Home Truths Alan Gordon was doing home truths programmes for Radio Sweden.

Unnoticed too has been Alan Gordon’s political interviews. In an age of the rottweiler interview of a Brian Redhead, John Humphries, Jeremy Paxman or Jonathan Ross and the talk show approach of a David Frost, Jimmy Young, Michael Parkinson or Channel Four’s Richard & Judy, Alan Gordon’s interviews with up-and-coming politicians like Anna Lindh had a style that blended respect with curiosity and tempers scepticism with affection for the values that the Swedish politician brings to public life…consensus, cooperation, fairness, equality, decency and common courtesy.

Alan Gordon lives in Stockholm and runs his own media company Cultura Communications where he works with William N. Shepherd providing a one-stop language, voice-over and speech-writing service over the internet for Swedish multinationals and other globally-oriented media professionals.