Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Munch stood up. The soundtrack consisted solely of heartbeats, heavy breathing, the occasional cough. Munch crossed to the nearest paintings. Viewers could now see cords attached to the bottom of each frame. One by one Munch tugged the cords, as if the paintings were roller blinds, and they positively shot up to disclose entirely different pictures underneath. One was given to understand that Munch did the same to every single picture because, when he left the circular room, on the walls hung twenty-odd unrecognisable paintings, glowing ominously and offensively. These pictures had been produced by Jonas’s skilled technicians; they were digitally distorted versions of Munch’s images; hideous pictures with garish colours and tortuous figures, a long way from the modern idea of a good painting. This was Wergeland’s way of showing that we have already forgotten how radical Munch’s work once was, how differently he painted. He did not observe, he saw . To us, those paintings with their smouldering energy had long since become tame calendar fodder, something for the bedroom wall, reproductions to hang in our toilets. It was no longer considered shocking for someone to paint a tree without showing the branches, or a green face, or a countenance with no nose, ears, mouth; for paint to be squirted onto the canvas. With his distorted images, these ‘new’ Munch pictures, Jonas Wergeland wanted to show just how outlandish the original works must have seemed to his contemporaries, what an outrageously far cry they were from anything else being painted at that time, not least in the German art world, where battle scenes and naturalistic pictures were all the rage. Wergeland may even have wished to imply that somewhere in Norway today there had to be another young Munch — an artist we laughed at. It was ironic, certainly, that so many of those who complained to NRK about this scene resorted to the same sort of invective as was levelled at Munch by critics of his day. These ‘new’ pictures in Jonas Wergeland’s otherwise enthralling programme had to be the work of some ‘charlatan painter’, they wrote; those painting were nothing but hideous ‘daubs’, ‘feverish hallucinations’.

The scene ended with the doors of the gallery being opened to the Berlin public. Jonas Wergeland presented close-ups of faces streaming past, their features expressing shock, disgust, laughter, fury. The last shot was of the face of a man putting his hands to his head and screaming in horror at what he had seen.

When this programme was shown on British television — one newspaper described it as being every bit as revolutionary in terms of form and colour as Munch’s pictures — Jonas Wergeland felt that he had repaid a little of his debt; he knew how much he owed to Great Britain after his course of study in a hotel room in London. In fact, towards the tail end of that ‘term’, as he liked to call it, Wergeland himself witnessed something which made him want to scream. This too involved seeing, seeing something behind reality — or what, up to this point in his life, he had taken for reality. In London, he would think later, it wasn’t just my outer eye that got whacked, but my inner eye too.

One afternoon, before the start of the day’s programmes, Jonas took the tube out to White City to take a look at an edifice which held for him the same sacred status as St Paul’s Cathedral, and was as closely bound up in his mind with the proud history and culture of Britain as Trafalgar Square or Bloomsbury: the BBC Television Centre at Wood Lane. Jonas stood outside the brick façade, aware that he was looking at a monument to a highly advanced civilisation. The old British Empire might have collapsed, but what he saw before him, or that which it represented, British television, was the seat of a new, modern empire — an invisible dominion. And the might of this empire was founded on such diverse wonders as The Great War, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, The Dave Allen Show and The Voyage of Charles Darwin .

Outside, and later inside, this building, his thoughts went to the most groundbreaking piece of television he had ever seen, this too from the BBC stable. Jonas had been at home, nodding off in front of the box, when Dennis Potter’s drama series Pennies From Heaven was shown on NRK; he had been totally unprepared for it when, only minutes into the first episode, Bob Hoskins, playing a sheet-music salesman who had just been rudely rebuffed by his wife, suddenly pulled back the curtains in his bedroom and burst into song, broke into ‘The Clouds Will Soon Roll By’, or rather: it was not him who was singing, it was a woman, but Bob Hoskins lip-synched along, as rapturously and sincerely as if the song were emanating from his own head, a thought abruptly transformed into song. It came as such a shock, Jonas had to rub his eyes precisely as he had done when Mr Dehli did conjuring tricks with the maps or showed how a third thought could act as a catalyst. Television was never the same again; Jonas Wergeland always said that it was at that moment, when Bob Hoskins put his heart and soul into ‘The Clouds Will Soon Roll By’ in a seemingly drab naturalistic setting from thirties’ England, that he first felt the urge to make television programmes himself, even though some years were to pass before he finally came to that decision. Potter had shown him that you could do anything on TV. Good television could show you the inside of a head, show how a person was thinking . As far as Jonas was concerned, Dennis Potter was the only true genius fostered by television, and indeed one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, the one against whom Jonas himself most wished to be measured. Just as the Renaissance ushered in a new approach to painting, Dennis Potter proved that flat television images could offer experiences of a hitherto unknown depth. Jonas was especially fascinated by the way he used the old popular songs of the thirties and, in The Singing Detective , the forties, as if they were every bit as valid, as fraught with emotion, as hymns or fairy tales. Thanks to his experience with Rubber Soul, Jonas had no difficulty in comprehending the sentimental force of these tunes, their ability to convey the inexpressible. The way Jonas Wergeland saw it, it was Dennis Potter who had led him to that hotel bed in London.

Possibly it was because of the exalted frame of mind induced by his visit to the BBC’s headquarters that he was caught so much off guard by the sight that awaited him when he got off the train in South Kensington. He was in his usual shop on the corner of the arcade in the old station building, taking receipt of a bag containing two chicken sandwiches and two bacon-and-egg sandwiches for the evening’s television marathon, when he started, actually jumped about three feet in the air. Somebody he knew had just walked by outside. His aunt. Aunt Laura. Flamboyantly dressed and looking, from her make-up, as if she had come straight from a stage on which she was playing the lead in an Egyptian romance. And she was not alone, with his aunt was another woman, similarly dressed. Both wore the sort of hats you saw on women at Royal Ascot. Jonas heard them speak to one another in English. They were followed by a man wheeling a goods trolley. Propped up on it was a rug. Jonas had noticed that there was a shop between the two flights of stairs leading down to the platforms. The man lifted the rug into an estate car sitting right outside the arcade; it had British plates and obviously belonged to the woman with his aunt. As if that wasn’t enough, Jonas got the definite impression that these two women were more than friends, they were lovers. Jonas was on the point of calling out, but something stopped him.

Standing there in the sandwich shop he wished he could see the pattern on the rug that Aunt Laura had had wheeled out to the car. Something about the cylinder on the trolley reminded him of a piece of paper — a message — in a bottle, he was sure that everything would be explained if he could just unfold it.