The Discoverer (41 page)

Having abandoned his original, high-flying plans – behind him lay several disheartening years at university and college – Jonas Wergeland considered himself lucky to have found a job in which his talent did not trouble him, where he could, in fact, in all likelihood, have buried it for good and all. But since he and Margrete had been together – he was inclined to say: because of Margrete – an ambition had begun to stir in him once more. He wanted to make television programmes himself. In the early eighties, Jonas Wergeland made the leap from announcer to programme-maker, moved by a desire to try to dive, as it were, from the surface down into the depths. When the NRK bosses agreed to his request he packed his suitcase, with Margrete’s blessing, and left the country. If one did not know better, one might think that he had had second thoughts, that he was running away from his big chance.

Later, all manner of rumours went the rounds – prompted mainly by the acrobatic, televisual feats Wergeland performed – about where he had been and what he had done. Some people affirmed that the original idea
discernible
behind all of Wergeland’s programmes could only be ascribed to his having been inspired by Sufism during a visit to Samarkand – an assertion which also appeared in print in a serious article. Others maintained, with all the confidence of insiders, that he had been sitting at the feet of the
celebrated
film director Michelangelo Antonioni. There were even a few who, in the wee, small hours in some bar, could be heard to mumble something about a Mexican woman by the name of Maya. None of these more or less mythical accounts came anywhere close to the truth. Over the years, to the question regarding what had led up to his epoch as a programme-maker, Wergeland honed an honest, if cryptic reply which not uncommonly so nonplussed his interlocutor that he or she asked no more questions: ‘I got to the top by lying on my back.’

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.

All credit to NRK. Other than Denmark, Norway was the only country in the seventies to import more programmes from Great Britain than from the United States. Not much is known about Jonas Wergeland’s political views, beyond his adherence to an obdurate Outside Left line, but it is safe to say that he regarded the Americanisation of Europe with something resembling serious concern. It was one thing to be dependent on the United States where matters of security policy were concerned, quite another to be reliant on the US when it came to making sense of the world. There was, for some years, an ongoing debate as to whether America should be allowed to deploy missiles in Norway, but what everyone forgot was that it had already deployed
something
far more important there: its television programmes. So when Jonas Wergeland elected to go to England to gain inspiration for television projects – and not to America, as so many other people in Norwegian broadcasting did – this was as much a conscious decision as choosing a European
film-maker
as role model.

Nothing but the best would do. London was, for Jonas Wergeland, what Rome had been for Henrik Ibsen. He found a new aim in life, a standard to live up to. He had his eyes opened to true excellence – a crucial lesson for someone from a country where every mediocre variety-show crooner was hailed as the new Caruso. Jonas also formed a firm belief – one to which he would hold even when many, later, would call him naive: the belief that television could have a democratising effect, that at certain happy moments television could actually rouse people, encourage them to think big. In short, it was in London, through the studies he conducted in a hotel room in the early eighties, that Jonas Wergeland became convinced that it paid to go for quality, even in a commercial context, and that quality did not necessarily preclude entertainment.

So it was no great achievement to simply lie on a bed and watch TV for a whole month at a stretch, jotting down the odd note now and again, more or less sketching out an idea; in fact it was a pleasure. Jonas felt sure that he could train himself to be a TV wizard merely by lying back and moving nothing but his fingertips. People today often complain that they get up from the television with a feeling of emptiness. When Jonas Wergeland got up off that bed in London after staring at the screen for four solid weeks, he did so as a cultivated man. He did not even feel bad about the fact that he had not visited any of the countless museums and galleries around his hotel as he had planned.

The fact is, you see, that Jonas was a bit of an art lover. As a small boy
he had often attended exhibitions with his maternal grandmother. Not only did he love looking at the pictures, he delighted just as much in the things Jørgine was liable to say about them, comments which made passers-by turn their heads and stare, dumbfounded, at the elderly lady with the cigar stump wedged in the corner of her mouth. He particularly remembered their
wanderings
through the National Gallery, best of all their visits to the red room where the light streamed down over magnificent canvases by the so-called National Romantics – not least among them Johann Christian Dahl. Granny could spend half an hour just gazing at the massive painting from Stalheim in Sogn, telling Jonas about how it was painted and what it depicted, and look at those teeny-weeny figures on the road and the goats in the foreground and oh, isn’t that sweet, that horse there has a foal, d’you see? As a grown man, whenever Jonas came across that picture in one of its countless reproductions it was not only his grandmother he thought of – J.C. Dahl’s painting also brought with it another, even stronger memory, one bound up with the Byrds’ exquisitely wistful, biblically-inspired song ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’.