9

I'm trying to remember a movie or TV show that PBS ran sometime in the early to mid 1980s. I recall it being called something like "Royal Toilet", but web searching suggests I'm mistaken. This was a Scandinavian film. At the time I thought it was from Sweden, but someone told me it was from Denmark.

As I recall:

The story was mostly set in and around a factory, and was driven by an upcoming visit by the king. Comedy develops from the fact that the king has been suffering from some kind of digestive problem, so there needs to be a toilet available in case he needs it. The factory owners can't imagine sending the king to the communal bathroom that the workers use, so they decide they have to build a special king's toilet to be available on the day. Building this becomes the job of the factory foreman, who is strongly anti-royalist. In the end the king doesn't need the toilet, so the planning was for nothing. The foreman decides that since he built it, he's going to use it. He loudly sings an anti-royalist song while doing so.

Improve this question
0

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
19

Found this by a keyword search "toilet" + "royal visit", which brought me to the 1986 Swedish film Kunglig Toilette (which literally translates as 'Royal Toilet').

The story takes place in a small community where King Carl XVI Gustaf will arrive.

Improve this answer
4
  • 4
    It doesn’t really translate well, but toilette is a deliberately archaic and Francophone spelling of what is normally spelt toalett in Swedish.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 24 at 11:07
  • 4
    @JanusBahsJacquet It seems to translate to English just fine as "Royal Toilette", which also looks archaic and Francophone.
    – nanoman
    Commented Nov 24 at 17:36
  • 3
    @nanoman The difference is that in English toilette – apart from looking archaic and Francophone – is a different word (with a different pronunciation) that only means ‘attending to your ablutions and appearance, not ‘lavatory’. In Swedish, both toilette and toalett are pronounced /tuːaˈlεtː/ and carry both meanings, so it doesn’t match well enough that the translation fully works. In English, you have to choose whether you want it to mean ‘royal ablutions’ or ‘royal lavatory’; in Swedish, it means both, with the added archaic Francophonicity as an extra twist.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 24 at 22:53
  • 2
    a title in English, particularly in the US, would be something like "The Royal Lavatory" - which has that posh feel which is the point. (Janus perfectly explains why "Royal Toilette" is hopeless.) (Note that, of course, you can't "Translate!" things like song lyrics or titles. You have to capture the spirit in a new rendering.)
    – Fattie
    Commented Nov 25 at 16:39

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .