Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Now of course this should not be taken too literally. What Nora Næss — likewise Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum — wished to convey was, first and foremost, a sense of being taken seriously: a sense of gratitude that someone had fondled her of all people, her eyes, her ears, all of her senses, not least her intellect, giving her a sort of all-embracing sense that this concerned her, concerned her to such a degree that it gave her goosebumps.

So over the months that followed Nora made sure, as did Nanna and Nina, that she saw all of the programmes in the series; in fact she not only saw them, she lived them, she videotaped them and watched them again, more than once, really watched them. For the first time, thanks to Jonas Wergeland’s television series, Nora Næss thought of herself as a viewer, or rather as a seer in the true sense of that word, a visionary. Because, although she found it hard to put into words, she had seen something new , something important, something she had never seen before which filled her with a positive energy and moved her to watch the programmes yet again, such that she was constantly discovering aspects and details that she had missed on previous occasions while at the same time spotting more of the similarities and devices that cropped up again and again; thus she was continually expanding her grasp of the common thread linking all of the programmes. ‘They’re like gems within a larger gem,’ as she put it, not knowing that Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum had said pretty much the same thing. She talked about those programmes, really felt a need to speak to someone after viewing them, and since others had the same urge, they discussed them in the staff room or outside the local shop or in each others’ homes. Nora Næss also talked to her husband about them, in case anyone thinks there were problems on that front. He had seen the first two programmes out in the North Sea and was every bit as hooked on them as she; in fact they actually believed, both of them, that their relationship was somehow strengthened by the series.

I am telling you this in order to make it clear that there is no way that Jonas Wergeland’s series, Thinking Big , can be condensed into words; what is more, in resumé it seems banal and rather dull. I would like therefore to take this opportunity to apologize for my earlier accounts of it, because the series’ success, if that is the right word, is impossible to explain. Mind you, media experts have for a long time been producing big fat treatises in which they have attempted to analyse why and how these programmes had such an impact, but apart from citing those factors which were patently obvious, such as the high professional standard, the sophisticated technical quality, they had to admit defeat and resort instead to drawing parallels with poetry, not to mention mysticism and talk of ‘the unutterable’. A few did keep their feet on the ground and venture to highlight Jonas Wergeland’s voice ‘which has the same appeal as that of a prime minister, a national father-figure’, some spoke of his knack for composing pictures while others pointed to the original viewpoints, the actual angle of attack, and still others latched onto his personal presence in the programmes, the intensity of his expression — all this without, of course, a single person mentioning anything about a silver thread in his spine, a crystal prism in his head or balls of gold. No one has yet been able to say anything about the cause, only about what an almost narcotic effect the series had on large sections of the Norwegian viewing public.

How could such a thing happen? When Jonas Wergeland started working in television, he simply had the gift. Everyone who met him while he was learning his craft — not just mastering the technical side but making a close study of the very best television productions from around the world, from Britain in particular — was struck by his obvious rapport with the camera, a creativity within the medium that could only be described as an innate talent. Even after the programmes he made in the early eighties, viewers like Nora Næss were exclaiming ‘God, that was terrific’ as if, after twenty years of watching television, they had had their first encounter with great television, one which instantly threw other programmes into relief for them. All at once, people like Nora Næss from the town of Bryne over in Jæren, saw how bland and, above all else, how dull, all of those other programmes were, even on Saturday evenings. You see it is easy to forget that Jonas Wergeland’s programmes also provided entertainment, with knobs on. And in the midst of this entertainment, while people were thoroughly enjoying themselves, he tore conventions apart, reflecting things from totally unexpected angles, accentuating details in the bigger picture that left people like Nora Næss agape at the picture as a whole. Consequently, Jonas Wergeland also found on several occasions, precisely because the form of the programmes put across the subject matter in an unusual and striking fashion, that he was setting the agenda for other media — saw how the newspapers in particular tended to follow up his programmes with long, probing articles.

Even so, Jonas Wergeland was also astonished by the tremendous impact of Thinking Big , which he thought could perhaps be put down to the fact that it was produced as a series, with the programmes being shown at two-week intervals for almost a year, and that in this way they had a cumulative effect. However that may be, he did in fact succeed in realizing the concept of the title, borrowed from Henrik Ibsen who, in his application for a writer’s grant wrote that he would fight for ‘that vocation that is for me the most important and the most necessary in Norway, that of arousing the Nation and encouraging it to think big’. It really was quite remarkable. For nigh on a year not only Nora Næss and Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum but virtually the entire population of Norway went around thinking big. It has been said that people walked differently in Norway that year, with straighter backs. It was quite an achievement — and let me add: a mystery unequalled in the history of Norway. For one brief moment, Jonas Wergeland lifted a whole nation a few centimetres above, or out of, its accustomed ways of thinking.

It should be said, however, that this phenomenon is unlikely ever to be repeated, inasmuch as Jonas Wergeland’s series was shown during the heyday of public broadcasting; when money was not only made available for serious programmes of this sort but when it was still also possible to gather an entire nation in front of the television screen at one time, a time which will soon be looked back on with nostalgia, just as there are many now who recall how certain radio broadcasts could command the ears of the whole country in the fifties.

Even so, none of the bosses at NRK, broadcasters to the nation, had any idea what was going on. They were quite simply not prepared. To be honest, it was so totally unlikely that such a concept, a series of programmes about famous Norwegian men and women, should score a hit with the general public at all. But for a year, via the television screen, Jonas Wergeland held a whole nation mesmerized; towards the end, if you remember, it became almost a mass psychosis — it was not only Nora Næss and Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum who sat glued to the screen but everyone with eyes to see, so to speak, as if it were the final episode in some long-running detective series or the lead-in to a disclosure that would directly affect their own lives. After each programme the NRK switchboard was inundated with calls from people who did not want to complain but simply to give vent to their heartfelt enthusiasm, who wanted Jonas Wergeland’s telephone number, wanted his address, or those of the actors, Normann Vaage and Ella Strand; or who were insisting that the programme be repeated, at once, as soon as possible. People bombarded the newspapers with spontaneous and frank communications of all kinds. In one ecstatic letter an impotent man declared that watching the programmes had revived his sex life.