Ben Hamilton
August 28th, 2017

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Liam pulls no punches, but maybe a few pints (photo: screenshot)

If there’s one guarantee when you move to Denmark, you won’t get any media work speaking English.

The Danes might be the second best non-native English-speakers in the world, but when it comes to the news on TV2 and DR, it’s a strictly all-Danish zone, which can often mean flying reporters at great expense all over the world to report on breaking news – just so it’s in Danish.

Authentic English flavour
But bucking this trend, and with great success apparently, is TV3 and its English sports reporter Liam Barker, who is bringing an authentic flavour to the channel’s football coverage with his postcards from the Premier League.

The first of his monologue video reviews of the week’s action has already been viewed over 88,000 times and received 771 comments from Danish fans who have mostly embraced his way of telling it how it is.

Says what the fans say
Put simply, Barker says what fans say. He swears profusely, delivers under-the-belt one-liners, goes into cliché overdrive and delusionally praises his beloved team, Stoke City.

Performances like his can be witnessed every weekend lunchtime in English pubs ahead of kickoff, so why not give Danish fans a taste of the real thing, TV3 reasons.

The future of footy coverage?
While the likes of Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer will be choking on their cornflakes at the thought that a respectable broadcaster permits one of its reporters to gratuitously curse and insult personalities within the game, the use of English swear words is generally considered inoffensive in Denmark.

Thanks to this gap in the market, TV3 and Barker, a former writer for the Copenhagen Post’s listing guide InOut, could have a genuine online hit on their hands, particularly as it picks up interest across the world.

It could be only be a matter of time before Lineker introduces Match of the Day with “WTF was that!”