One really sick TV Christmas calendar: Negotiating identity in ‘Yallahrup Ferry Town’

The 2007 television Christmas calendar, Yallahrup Færgeby/‘Yallahrup Ferry Town’, upsets the normal conventions of Danish television Christmas specials, shifting attention away from the cosy aspects of the holiday season, and towards unsettling aspects of the contemporary urban Danish landscape. The 24-episode series, which uses puppets as part of an easily recognized satire of the classic 1974 Jullerup Færgeby/‘Jullerup Ferry Town’ calendar, focuses on the social challenges confronting two adolescents, Ali and Hassan, as they negotiate life in a dysfunctional urban school. The two boys, whose ethnic heritage is ‘other than Danish’, cycle through nearly all the Orientalist stereotypes of the immigrant in Danish culture, yet manage to emerge at the end of the series with an evolving sense of self that neither plays into the assimilationist policies of the Danish government nor aligns with the crippling stereotypes of criminal immigrant youths unable to find meaningful positions in Danish society.