Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

In going abroad, Jonas was making a virtue of necessity. Timewise, his trip fell exactly midway between the two referendums which led to Norway saying no to Europe. Although Jonas Wergeland often viewed his homeland as an unscrupulous Festung Norwegen , there were times when he was more inclined to liken the Norwegians’ tendency to shut themselves off to a mentality he found reflected in René Goscinny’s and Albert Uderzo’s hilarious Asterix comics. For while their Gallic neighbours allowed themselves to be conquered by the Romans, Asterix and his kinsmen stood their ground. One small village still held out, as it said at the beginning of each story. The same could have been said of Norway. The way Jonas saw it, the wealthy land of Norway had surprisingly many things in common with Asterix’s indomitable community. Norway, too, shielded itself from the world around it, while raising menhirs to its own excellence and having its praises sung by unspeakable bards. Like Asterix’s Gauls, the Norwegian people considered themselves invincible, and the oil was their magic potion. Jonas Wergeland did not find it at all hard to envisage Norway as the world’s largest village, surrounded, and almost driven into the sea, by the mighty civilisation of the Roman Empire.

But, like Asterix, sometimes one had to journey out — out of the provinces, to the Rome of one’s day. And because of his special requirements, Jonas Wergeland was never in any doubt as to what was the Rome of his day: London. Jonas’s favourite Asterix story was, as it happens, Asterix in Britain . Generally speaking, Jonas felt he had a lot of ties with the British metropolis, from the music of LPs such as Rubber Soul , recorded at Abbey Road, to the exterior scenes from films like Blow-Up , which had got into his blood.

Jonas booked into a hotel in Harrington Road in South Kensington, only a stone’s throw from the tube station. The hotel is under new ownership now, and has a new name. Nonetheless, they ought to hang a plaque on the wall outside, because it was here that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of his illustrious career. It was in this part of the city, too, that he would have two encounters which would totally floor him, the one physically, the other mentally.

Jonas Wergeland never took an academic degree in Norway, but if his uncompleted studies in astrophysics and architecture could be said to count as a foundation course of sorts, then his major course of study was conducted in London. Jonas always maintained that he left Norway to study at Britain’s foremost university. And by Britain’s foremost university he meant neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but British Television. Jonas Wergeland travelled to London quite simply to watch television. So he had only two requirements in choosing a hotel: the television in his room and the accompanying remote control had to be in good working order, and the bed had to meet a satisfactory standard. I should perhaps also say that this was in the days before satellite dishes made it possible for NRK — or anyone else, for that matter — to receive virtually any channel you could wish for. Although Jonas would probably have gone anyway: he preferred to conduct these studies in secret.

Having got himself installed, he strolled eagerly down to Exhibition Road and a shop selling art materials. Here he purchased a large notebook with blank pages and marbled covers together with a couple of good pens. For once, Jonas Wergeland was planning to write, and to his mind this was such a momentous decision that he thought of his new acquisition as a copybook, much like the ones in which he had written his first ‘a’s, or ‘H’s, ladders up which to climb. In a newsagent’s next to the tube station he bought the TV Times and the Radio Times , which between them provided information on the week’s programmes on all four channels. And the rest, you might say, is history. Jonas pulled out a pen, opened the notebook at the first blank page, switched on the TV and settled back on the bed, and there he stayed. In one month he got through four thick notebooks with different coloured marbled covers, filling them with terse notes in tiny writing, as well as lots of little diagrams and sketches. In later years he would refer to these four volumes as ‘the golden notebook’.

It’s odd really. Norway’s most influential television personality of all time was for a long while very sceptical of television. A scepticism which quickened one late August afternoon towards the end of the sixties when he and a couple of chums went home with one of their classmates to complete a tricky homework exercise set by Mr Dehli. Instead, they all ended up with their eyes glued to the television screen. And what were they watching, these otherwise so rebellious, angry young men, who should perhaps have been more concerned with what was going on in the newly invaded Czechoslovakia? They sat totally transfixed, watching the wedding of the Crown Prince of Norway to Miss Sonja Haraldsen. They were dazzled by how brilliantly NRK controlled the eighteen cameras in operation for the occasion: five inside the cathedral and thirteen along the procession route. Norway had taken the definitive step into the television age and the era of the mass media, a time when the world once more became flat and small, a time when people seemed to imagine that a screen could represent reality.

Jonas Wergeland’s negative attitude towards television changed, however, over the next decade, thanks in large part to the passion for films which he indulged along with Leonard. He also understood that he would have to take television seriously for the simple fact that people around him would spend something like ten years of their waking lives as Homo zappiens, stuck in front of the TV screen. And that this box would therefore act as the fount from which they would obtain almost all of their knowledge, their humour and their moral values. People would no longer read, they would watch . Jonas Wergeland was one of the first to comprehend that the NRK building in Marienlyst far outweighed the Parliament when it came to influencing people, to shaping the attitudes and opinions of the Norwegian people.

Nevertheless, he continued to be extremely selective in his viewing, and his scepticism remained intact. What bothered him most was that, as a medium, television did not exploit its own inherent potential to the full. On top of which, he had observed that television almost always rendered intelligent individuals dumb. Or perhaps he should have said ‘flat’. He first witnessed a demonstration of this on an Open to Question programme in which the Aurlandsdalen question came up for discussion and one of Norway’s most knowledgeable botanists was laughed out of court, made to look like a complete fool and treated as such by the programme’s chairman — the first, by the way, in a long succession of television presenters who would be applauded and admired for making fun of clever people.

It did, however, take Jonas some time to find the common denominator in his favourite programmes, productions which made an indelible impression on him, almost in spite of himself: all were British. Over the years Jonas would come to have something approaching a love affair with the BBC, as well as ITV — the collective name for such independent television companies as Granada, Anglia, Thames and Yorkshire Television. Jonas’s heart instinctively lifted whenever one of their logos appeared on the screen: Thames Television’s reflected image of St Paul’s Cathedral, Anglia’s revolving knight.

So what did Jonas watch? First and foremost, through NRK’s Television Theatre he was introduced to examples of superb British television drama, plays by such strong and controversial figures as Peter Watkins and Ken Loach and lengthy, top-quality series like The Brontes of Haworth and David Copperfield . NRK’s own clued-up drama department had screened marathon productions such as The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs, Downstairs, The Onedin Line and I, Claudius — every one of them so good as to be unforgettable. And thanks to the NRK documentary department — or the Swedish channels, for those who could receive them — the people of Norway were able to enjoy mammoth ventures along the lines of Life on Earth and Civilization , in which the programmes’ respective presenters, David Attenborough and Kenneth Clark, popped up here, there and everywhere as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to inform, to enlighten viewers on the mysteries of Nature and mankind’s tortuous cultural development. Jonas realised early on that some of these television programmes would leave their mark on an entire generation, not only in Norway, but throughout the world; that they would be employed as rock-solid points of reference in life.