Walter Presents global television service is the go-to destination for foreign-language treats

German drama 'Deutschland 83' kick-starts the service from Channel 4

Reach for the Stasi: Jonas Nay and Maria Schrader in 'Deutschland 83' (Channel 4)

It will be 10 years next summer that BBC4 began screening a French cop show called Spiral, the first in a long line of foreign-language police dramas chosen by the BBC's pioneering head of programme acquisition, Sue Deeks, that would introduce the term Scandi noir to the English language and prove that supposedly insular British TV viewers were willing and able to cope with subtitles.

Shows such as The Killing, Borgen and The Bridge would grip us with their storylines, but also broaden Anglo-Saxon horizons beyond the usual British and American landscapes. Who knew that Copenhagen in the late November gloom could be so exhilarating?

Nowadays subtitles are cropping up all over UK television – still a mainstay of BBC4's Saturday night, but increasingly on Sky Arts, Channel 4 and More 4. And it's Channel 4 that is now making the most ambitious leap into global TV with a curated service called Walter Presents – some of the shows being broadcast in the traditional manner – at a set time, in weekly drip-feeds, on Channel 4 and More 4 – the rest available on All 4 to download completely and instantly, in the style of Amazon and Netflix. Except that they will be free. “May lead to binge watching”, quips the press release.

“It's all the fantastic box-sets you never knew existed,” says Walter Iuzzolino, the TV producer who he has worked mainly for Channel 4 features, making shows like The Undateables and Heston's Great British Food, but is also a world-drama enthusiast who has personally watched more than 3,500 hours of non-English television to make his selection. “Walter Presents is a small deli but not a supermarket,” he says with an evident ear for a soundbite. “Everything is delicious.”

The slight, bald and bespectacled Iuzzolino grew up in Italy, where – in the absence of a proud tradition of domestic drama – an awful lot of television is dubbed. “I was exposed to a broad range of stuff,” he says, “from German cop shows to Argentinian telenovelas. But language is not a barrier to good storytelling.”

And it's a German drama that kick-starts the service, Deutschland 83 being a fascinating insight into how East Germans viewed West Germans at the height of the Cold War in the Eighties. Jonas Nay plays a young East German border guard who becomes sent to spy on the American Pershing II missile system shortly after President Ronald Reagan's “evil empire” speech began the rocky road ride to unification, and is bemused by telephone technology, supermarket choice and the taste of McDonald's. “It's full of chemicals,” warns his spy-master in Bonn. “To keep their people fat and lazy.”

Other initial offerings include Spin, a sort of French version of the Danish drama Borgen, and going behind the scenes of Gallic spin doctors in the aftermath of the assassination of the French president. I'm not sure what this says about President Hollande's approval ratings, but Spin achieved record ratings when it was shown in France.

Another French show, the black comedy-drama Kaboul Kitchen, tells the real-life story of journalist Marc Victor, who ran a restaurant for expats in Afghanistan in 2005. “Comedy dictators, troublesome Taliban neighbours, corrupt politicians, shady deals, easy sex and easy money”, is how the production notes describe this multi-award winning series.

The sexy Danish supernatural thriller Heartless, which Iuzzolino describes as “Twilight for adults” and is set in an elite boarding school, has been written by the co-creator of The Bridge, Nicolaj Scherfig, and stars Nikolaj Kopernikus, the killer in the first series of The Killing. And the French crime thriller Match Day, in which a detective returns to her hometown to investigate the mysterious death of a young football fan (and is shocked to discover that her sister may be implicated), has been made by the award-winning director of Spiral, Virginie Sauveur.

And one new show I'm particularly looking forward to (it will be on More 4 in February) is a black comedy-drama by novice Belgian writer Malin-Sarah Gozin, who describes it as “Desperate Housewives on acid”. Clan follows five sisters who plot to bump off the abusive husband of their youngest sibling.

There are also dramas in the first batch from Sweden, Argentina and the Czech Republic, Iuzzolino saying that the Czech and the Mexican dramas he watched surprised him most with their quality. How hard was it to boil down his selection?

“There's a lot of all right stuff out there,” he says. “People have raised their game since 2005 and Mad Men and Spiral. House of Cards and Breaking Bad... that's our threshold”. And Iuzzolino took equal care over the quality of the subtitles. “We chose our own team of people,” he says. “I'm slightly obsessive about it because I've watched so many terrible subtitles.”

'Deutschland 83' begins on 3 January at 9pm on Channel 4. 'Spin', 'Match Day' and 'Heartless' will be available to download on All 4 from the same date