I'm as gung-ho as the next Radio Times reader for the current wave of imported Scandinavian TV drama, which began with Wallander, reached critical mass with The Killing and The Killing II, hit another peak of chilly-but-aspirational sophistication with Borgen, and is about to regroup with Swedish-Danish co-production The Bridge.
This can only be a good thing for terrestrial viewers as the digital switchover means we can all, technically, get BBC4, where the bulk of the new "Scandi-drama" lives.
It's very much the big new thing, isn't it? Except... for fans of world cinema, Scandinavia is old news.
Seasoned film historians will point out the significant influence of silent Swedish directors Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller in the 1920s, who both went to Hollywood, and Danish master Carl Dreyer, who made The Passion of Joan of Arc in 1928, still considered an all-time classic.
Though it remains Dreyer's crowning achievement, the latter was not definitively "Scandi" - rather, it was an important slice of French history about a then recently canonised French icon made in France.
Scandinavia's national cinema changed after the Second World War, when Ingmar Bergman put Sweden on the map, with lyrical, personal and later gloomily existential dramas set and shot in recognisably Scandinavian locations - all clean air, modern, low-rise housing and unspoilt landscapes - plus in the pivotal Summer with Monika in 1953, a distinctly unfettered attitude to nudity.
I feel sure that if I was old enough to have been around in the 1950s and had been exposed to Bergman's early films, I would have found a way into subtitled cinema there and then. As it is, I spent my formative years in the 70s and 80s besotted by and wedded to British and American films.
It took a good deal of self-education to broaden my own mind and bring myself up to speed in adult life, and I never looked back, these days preferring foreign films to English-speaking ones. But during that period of enlightenment, along with German, Italian and Japanese, it was Swedish cinema - essentially the vast back catalogue of Bergman - that most vividly captured my imagination.
Before he went to America, Lasse Hallstrom - the director who made Abba's videos in the 70s - gave us My Life as a Dog in 1985, and although this was his ticket out of Sweden, I like to think that he has brought a touch of his homeland to lyrical Hollywood films like The Cider House Rules and Chocolat. Around that time, we also saw Pelle the Conqueror and Babette's Feast from Denmark.
More important still to the establishment of Denmark's cinematic reputation was Dogme 95, the manifesto drawn up by a group of technically puritanical film-makers dominated by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, whose landmark works under Dogme's "Vow of Chastity" included The Idiots and Festen.
Von Trier, who also made Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Antichrist and last year's Melancholia, is one of the most thrilling film-makers operating today, in my opinion, working in Denmark and Sweden not out of nationalism but because he has a fear of flying.
The Swede Lukas Moodysson, once cited as an heir to Bergman, gave us Show Me Love, Together and Lilya 4-Ever, all superb films. The first two could not have been made anywhere but Sweden, the last was shot in Russia.
Novelist Stieg Larsson's success outside his native Sweden with his Millennium Trilogy - better known as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest - has done much to open British minds to the power of Scandinavian fiction, and the resulting Swedish-Danish co-produced films - now under way as a Hollywood trilogy, crucially still set in wintry Sweden - showed that Scandinavia can really do thrillers.
Just as Tomas Alfredson's vampire yarn Let the Right One In, also remade in America, showed that the Swedes can do horror. This, I guess, dovetails into The Killing and Borgen.
Certainly, let's celebrate the unique style of Scandinavian drama on television as we pull up an Ikea chair to watch The Bridge on BBC4. But let's not pretend that cineastes didn't see this one coming.