Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Remember, I say, remember that time with the sound check, when the ‘mic’s, those tiny lapel microphones, had already been attached, and they were all asked to say something. He listened to the others mouthing inane phrases, and because he had the idea that these said a lot about their subconscious minds, on impulse, when his turn came, he quoted Charles Darwin: ‘The mind cannot grasp,’ he said, as if plucking the words out of thin air, ‘the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years.’ No reaction, no laughter, just a ‘thank you, that’s fine’. A bad sign, he thought.

There were five minutes to go before they went out live on the air. Jonas studied the set décor, the flimsy studio walls which would give the viewers the impression of a relatively cosy room, but which to him represented something quite different, namely, the scene of a battle. Nor could the viewers tell that the light was disturbingly bright, as glaringly bright as the light in Eastern Greenland, he thought, peering round about him at these familiar surroundings which had suddenly become so alien, unreal, and as he did so he became aware of that ominous feeling of nausea that had dogged him throughout his life, the feeling that had hit him whenever he was too high up, or too far away, when contours were obliterated and details lost; a detector of sorts that picks up grandiose lies. One of the three cameramen nodded to him, Jonas could not tell whether it was a nod of encouragement or of malicious glee, he tried to catch the eye of Gunnhild, the floor manager, who was bustling about with a sheet of paper in each hand and a headset on, but she avoided looking his way, treating him with professional detachment, close to condescension, as if he were any ordinary guest. These people used to be his colleagues, now suddenly they were potential antagonists. He tried to breath deeply, slowly, he could tell he was nervous, and he had reason to be nervous; he had reached a critical juncture in his life, an event which could turn everything on its head, leave his brilliant career in ruins. That was the media circus for you. Riding high one day: consigned to oblivion the next. Like Timbuktu. A city of gold one year, a heap of sand the next. Jonas sat in that studio, bathed in an unpleasant light, and suddenly found himself wondering whether his prism was still out there somewhere, among the Tuaregs in the desert around Timbuktu, or whether perhaps it lay buried in the sand, one crystal among other crystals. Whatever the case, he could have done with it now, something to hold in his hand, something with which to break up that disturbingly bright light.

He looked at the two seated next to him, two people who would be vying with one another to tear him to pieces before the very eyes of the Norwegian people; he turned his eyes up to the control room, high above the studio floor, could not make out anyone behind the walls of glass but knew they were there, seven of them at least, including the Colonel, the producer, an old adversary; Jonas knew that the Colonel was girding his loins for the transmission of his life, a golden opportunity; that at that very moment the Colonel was scrutinizing his face on several of the monitors in the bank in front of him, Jonas could almost feel it physically, this dissection, as if he had been carved up, ready for distribution to all those thousands of homes.

Four minutes to go until they went on the air. The cameras were gliding back and forth a bit. Up in the control room, they were checking the scene coverage, whether the lighting was okay, the colours, whether the cameras were matched up. Jonas knew the routine, he looked at the welter of cables on the floor, at the maze of spotlights on the grid above their heads, some of which could even be raised and lowered hydraulically, he stared up at this galaxy, letting himself be dazzled while he thought of how simple television actually was: light, an outward light, no more than that, even a white shirt could cause problems. Jonas was momentarily hypnotized, completely and utterly, by all that light, remembering, too, that this debate had been advertised as a meeting of stars — or, with the medium’s gift for exaggeration, as a collision of supernovae.

There is, as most Norwegians could tell you, some doubt as to whether Norway was actually united into one nation after the battle of Hafrsfjord, as generations of Norwegians were taught in school, which only serves to illustrate a fact which those same Norwegians find hard to swallow: that our knowledge of the world changes, old theories are adjusted, new theories are hatched. What is certain, however, is that Norway was united into one nation on that September evening in 1990, in the sense that a record number of Norwegians, close to two million — even the blind, so they said — had settled themselves in front of the television to see this programme, one which had been awaited with the sort of interest and excitement usually reserved for the live coverage of certain events at the winter Olympics, the sort that tend to occasion statements such as ‘the whole of Norway came to a standstill’.

Behind all this lay, of course, Jonas Wergeland’s stupendous series Thinking Big , which had put everything else on television in the shade the year before. Later, people were to talk of 1989 as being ‘Wergeland year’ in the history of NRK. Not only did people find themselves with a new Europe that year but also with a new NRK, twenty-odd programmes which, in keeping with the turbulent changes taking place on the international front, created, for a brief spell at any rate, a whole new awareness of Norway’s place in the world. But where, the year before, people had been on the alert, sitting there with pen and notebook in hand, or their fingers on the video record button, or at any rate with a cup of coffee to clear their brains, they now lounged back with their potato chips and mineral water, happily anticipating that this was going to be fun , and, it has to be said, harbouring a sneaking hope of a juicy bit of scandal.

So what had happened? A year before the focus had been on a provocative television project. Now the focus was all on Jonas Wergeland’s person. First it had been a matter of thinking big, then of thinking small. Within a matter of weeks an entire country had shrunk to one snide, narrow-minded small town.

In other words, on that evening, one of the most bizarre countries in the world had mustered its inhabitants in front of their television screens; an entire nation appeared to have discovered that it had been taken for a ride, and had now put itself, of its own free will, in the doghouse. They had heaped applause and acclaim and regard on a man of Norwegian birth, they had forgotten to run him down, they had neglected to draw attention to the hopelessly ambitious, pathetically misguided and, not least, brazenly speculative aspects of this project. But now — even if they were in the doghouse — it was time to break out the potato chips and peanuts, now all they had to do was to tip their Stress-Less chairs well back — the Stress-Less, that unique and oh-so-typical Norwegian invention, that TV chair par excellence — now it was high bloody time that they plucked the feathers off this cock-of-the-walk; now it was time to laugh at him, see him sweat, see him writhe on the spit as he was grilled by Audun Tangen himself, the Grand Inquisitor of Marienlyst, also known as ‘Audun the Tongs’ on account of his fearsome interviewing technique, in the early days of Norwegian television, at least. And this in itself, that it should be Tangen, was a salient factor, rendering the confrontation that much more piquant and diverting, when one considered that for a whole decade Tangen had been well and truly supplanted by Jonas Wergeland, so the Tongs had good cause to whet his instruments. Small wonder then that people lay well back in their Stress-Less chairs, stuffing their gobs with potato chips and looking forward to a demonstration of the subtle art of torture, or better still, all-out war masquerading as entertainment, or entertainment masquerading as a battle, depending on your point of view, not that there would be anything new in that, in a television age in which war had long since shown itself to be the best show in town — one only has to point to the war, the real battle, in the Persian Gulf, the first phase of which was already under way as Jonas Wergeland sat there next to Audun Tangen in the studio, and whose next phase, the allied air and ground attack on Iraq, would be one of the biggest and best stage-managed TV shows ever, a thrilling extravaganza that could be followed round-the-clock on CNN and the Norwegian news network.