Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

‘You can start when you see the red light,’ said the voice over the loudspeaker.

In one of the sidewalls was a large window into the main control room, CR1, and through the slats of the Venetian blinds Jonas could see the head of programming and a couple of technicians, together with the veteran announcer: people who would be judging his performance, which is to say, they were getting it on tape. Rudeng, the director was also there, as if he knew that something extraordinary was about to happen — something that would make a good story someday — and wanted, therefore, to witness it firsthand. He had his eyes fixed on the screen which was now showing Jonas’s face in profile, giving Jonas himself a feeling of seeing his face reflected in mirror upon mirror.

The red light came on and he began to read out the announcements on the sheet in front of him, totally disconnected phrases, the sort used to introduce a programme, or between programmes, or for rounding off the evening’s transmission. He read them out as best he could, trying to remember to look up every now and again, look at the camera lens, at the hub: he thought of Gabriel Sand, thought to himself that he was a television announcer, that he was many people, among them a television announcer; that it was inherent in him, it was just a matter of dredging it up; he read, pronouncing each word as clearly as possible, taking especial care over words in English, German and French. ‘And now, via Eurovision, we bring you a performance of the opera Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by the Orchester des Nationaltheaters Prague,’ he read. ‘The conductor this evening is Karl Böhm. The role of Don Giovanni will be sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau,’ he read. ‘And now,’ he read, ‘a programme on the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author, among other things, of the fable Le petit prince ,’ he read, and it was not going too badly, certain words and expressions in particular really hit home, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, for instance, and Le petit prince , hit home with a vengeance as if all his life had been a preparation for just this moment, for a job as a television announcer. He read on. ‘And we rounded off this evening’s programmes with “I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I Got”, performed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra,’ he read. ‘The soloists were Barney Bigard, Lawrence Brown, Ben Webster and Harry Carney with Herb Jeffries on vocals,’ he read, names he could have recited in his sleep; tried to look up every now and again at the faint light deep inside the camera lens, a bright dot, a photographic Pluto; he read on and on, no one asked him to stop, he went on reading for a long time, read all three sheets, in fact, a crazy assortment of announcements, out of context and yet oddly familiar; and when he reached the end and still no one had asked him to stop, he looked at the pane of glass and the people inside the control room, all of them with their eyes glued to the screen as if they had just been presented, not with a face, but a new planet, which was not all that far from the truth. Not until Jonas turned into profile did they rouse themselves. ‘Thank you,’ said the voice over the loudspeaker.

Rudeng asked him to come in to the control room. They reran the take, and the phenomenon was repeated. The others sat in total silence, hypnotized in fact, or as if they could not believe what they were seeing. Even Jonas was surprised, because it was powerful stuff. Only then, when he saw himself on a television screen, did Jonas realize what a striking face he had. And on the screen, or on camera, something had happened to it, making it even more striking; the face on the screen was different from the face he saw in the mirror. The camera must have acted like a prism in reverse, Jonas thought, in such a way that the lens united the entire spectrum of faces that he owned and transformed them into one powerful dazzling face. Jonas stared at the screen and felt, with a touch of dread, a tingling sensation creeping up his spine, and I would like to stress that this had nothing to do with his being infatuated with his own looks, what is known as narcissism — it was simply because, as Jonas himself realized, he found himself confronted with a work of art.

And right there and then, in that control room at NRK’s Television House, Jonas also realized something else, because he had not always had such a striking face, it must only have become fully formed some years earlier, through some slow process of inner growth, and Jonas understood that this face had something to do with the exceptional women with whom he had lain. He had converted this beauty into other currency, as his grandmother had done with her collection of paintings. He had converted it, not into cash, but into strength, into personality, into charisma.

Rudeng would later describe the most important criterion when assessing people: whether they could come across on screen. Jonas Wergeland had certainly come across on screen, so much so, said Rudeng that he had had to take a closer look at the monitor to satisfy himself that the image he was seeing was not, in fact, three-dimensional. Rudeng would tell that story again and again. ‘You should have been there when Jonas Wergeland auditioned for the job of announcer,’ he would say with a note of pride. ‘It was like witnessing someone breaking not the sound barrier, but the vision barrier.’

Before they parted, Rudeng asked Jonas whether he had been thinking of anything in particular. Jonas shook his head. But he had been thinking of something in particular, he had imagined that he was talking to Nefertiti, and that may well be why people would later say that they felt as though Jonas Wergeland spoke to them as a friend, directly to them, with a warmth and charm, not to say love, that could not help but strike at their hearts even if he were only presenting a run-down of the next day’s programmes. And in a way it was true, Jonas truly believed that Nefertiti was listening to him.

They called, of course they called; and he was signed up for a trial period, first assigned to the morning slot but soon moved to the evening broadcasts so that his real breakthrough came with the ingenuous words: ‘Good evening, and welcome to Children’s Hour .’

And from the word go, Jonas liked it, liked it better than reading astronomy or architecture; the minute he sat down on that chair he knew that there, finally, in that broom cupboard, was where he was meant to be; there, sitting all alone, talking out loud, talking to the wall; he could not explain it, but he loved it. It was a hub. He recalled Gabriel’s hymn of praise to his little boat: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, and to begin with he did not give much thought to the fact that, while he was sitting alone in that cupboard, his face was being reproduced a million times over, appearing on sets in a million households; nor did it occur to him, naïve though it may be, that his face would strike a chord with people, possibly because he had watched so little TV himself. To his surprise, however, people started nodding and smiling at him in the street and at bus-stops; and Jonas, who had long been in the business of recognizing fine art, pictures, when he saw it, found that he was now being recognized, like a picture, like fine art; and only then did it really dawn on him that there were people beyond the wall of the broom cupboard, that despite his seclusion, he was visible to all and sundry — a fact which was reinforced when the letters started to pour in, not to mention the people being turned away from reception, elderly ladies asking for his autograph.

Another few months were to go by before Jonas Wergeland perceived, with his eye for an angle, that the job of announcer was the one angle that revealed everything there was to know about Television House, the whole secret of television, for that matter: that it all came down to the face, to showing one’s face, to being recognized, no matter what one said or did. All that counted, as far as the public was concerned, was that you were a face on the TV. And hence, strangely enough, Jonas Wergeland felt as famous after a few months in the announcer’s chair as he did after years of programme making. The way he saw it, only from a tiny slice of the population could one win greater respect for creating something than for showing your face.