Nowadays the bilingual Nordic nations love British comedy.

If you've ever been to Scandinavia you'll know that everyone speaks English better than most people in England speak English. Ok so that's a sweeping generalisation - there are probably a few old folk in the Faroe Islands who never saw the need to bother learning it - but generally speaking, bilingualism is a way of life in the Nordic nations.

Which is handy if you're over there for a bit. Yes, buying a drink in Norway may involve taking out a small mortgage, but flick on the TV and you'll find a bunch of English and American comedy, in its original form. You might then end up watching some bizarre stuff that you'd never watch at home, admittedly, as they do import some random shows: there's an American reality show on Norwegian TV called Ax Men, for example, which is a bit like Made In Chelsea, but is all about guys who collect logs.

A lot of people in the Nordic nations hit the web for their entertainment, of course. Your average Swede might spend an evening gambling on which is the best online tutorial to help assemble their new IKEA table, or take a spin on some online viking slot games - lots of axes there too - or, indeed, check out some UK comedy. Our sense of humour clearly travels, as thousands of Scandinavians visit this very site every month, and our comics now often tour the Nordic nations.

Michael McIntyre has a whole routine about his awkward post-gig Oslo hotel room experience, for example (see the video below) - while Bill Bailey is often to be found tweeting from a Scandinavian café, with an interesting looking dish in the foreground. And you won't be surprised to hear that Eddie Izzard did Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden on his Wunderbar tour earlier this year.

In fact, Scandinavia is a popular gigging spot for comics of all stripes nowadays. It's like we're giving the Vikings a taste of their own medicine - but obviously this incursion is a bit more chatty and a lot less aggressive.

We don't just export comedians to the Nordic nations, though: obviously the English Premier League - or EPL, as everyone else in the world calls it - is absolutely huge pretty much everywhere. So when they show a live EPL game in Norway, they'll fly out-of-work English managers over as pundits, put them on a panel, and - it being a bilingual country - interview them in English, despite the rest of the chat being in Norwegian. It takes some getting used to.

It's the same with music. Many famous Scandinavian acts sing in English, from ABBA to Aha - ok, so Aha is still pretty early in the alphabet - to Alphabeat (nope, still really early), to Robyn, Roxette and The Raveonettes, then. But watch those bands perform in their native country, and they'll generally speak to the audience in Swedish, Danish or Norwegian, before then singing another song in English.

And no-one seems to mind. It's all part of life's rich smorgasbord.