Anna Hopi
Both of these winners have not only made good television, but also given a face and a voice to previously silenced topics, writes journalist Anna Hopi.
Topi Borg’s Kirjolla program and Linda Lampenius, who made the Linda documentary series, were among the awardees at Friday’s Venla gala. Matti Matikainen
On Friday, the awards for the television industry were handed out again at the Kultainen Venla gala. Everyone who picked up the award has earned it with hard work, but I think there are two real spiritual winners.
They are a charmer who together with the whole group from Ylen’s Kirjolla series about the lives of autistic people Top Borg as well as a survivor of years of Nygård hell and on the subject of MTV3 Linda-opened in his document Linda Lampenius. On their behalf, the heart skipped a beat because both of them knew how to make the most of the victory.
Topi Borg ran amok, jumped and shouted to her sister from the Venla stage so that Chord had burst into laughter – and on top of it all, the emperor’s uncle was still lying on the red carpet. The stars of the program and its creators have reason to be proud. The series has been a groundbreaking look at the autism spectrum and has brought out the theme of acceptance of difference in a heartwarming way.
Lampenius, in his joy of victory, threw flour into the mouth of a convicted sex offender, for whom he experienced years of torment.
– I want to send greetings to Peter Nygård to prison. The greetings are like this: Who won? Women won!
At that moment, chills went through the TV theaters. A somewhat fairytale moment, Beyonce’s Run The World (Girls) could very well have been playing in the background. The rich and power-hungry doesn’t always have the last word, but sometimes the bad guy really gets paid and the heroine gets to vent.
Everything was summed up in the moment experienced on stage: how Peter Nygård silenced Linda, who had previously spoken about what she saw in a magazine interview, with a defamation suit and her demands for millions in compensation. And how bad it must have felt to write a non-disclosure agreement about things you don’t want to keep quiet about. Lampenius said in his biography that the Nygård episode took away both his money and his health. All because she told the press what she saw at his villa in the Bahamas.
Both of these winners have not only made good television, but also given a face and a voice to previously silenced topics. Nepsyism has become a topic of mainstream discussion in recent years, but the Kirjolla series allowed the viewer to closely follow the everyday life of such people who are thought to be different and perhaps find a connection and a surface of identification: maybe deep down we are not so different after all.
Linda Lampenius’s documentary goes deeper than the surface, of course, through the story of a public figure, but it is much more. With Nygård’s sentence, the gruesome things that his female victims have had to keep inside for years may have finally come to light. In November 2023, Nygård was convicted of four sexual offenses in Toronto, and new charges have been filed since then.
The TV shows have attracted a lot of media attention and heated up the social debate. Although their topics are very different and from different genres, basically both programs highlight how every person should be treated equally and fairly.