Spede Pasanen

Pertti Olavi “Spede” Pasanen, a Finnish director, producer, comedian and inventor, earned the reputation of an all‑round entertainer. Over the course of his career he was involved in roughly fifty feature films—directing, writing, producing or acting—and also took part in a great many television projects, most famously the comedy series Spede Show and the game show Speden Spelit. A substantial portion of his more commercial output was created in partnership with Vesa‑Matti Loiri and Simo Salminen. Although his movies and TV programmes were often shot quickly on modest budgets, they rarely garnered critical praise but attracted a large Finnish audience from the 1960s onward. He owned his own production company, Filmituotanto Spede Pasanen Ky. In Yleisradio’s Suuret suomalaiset competition, he was placed seventeenth.