More than once during the shooting of this episode Jonas was reminded of what a thrill, what a boost he had got from making his first ever programme. Because, although Wergeland’s colleagues have insisted that he was a natural for television, that he had a sixth sense for where a camera ought to be placed, which passages were good and which were bad, this was not the case. When NRK, with some reservations, offered Jonas Wergeland, the increasingly popular television announcer, the chance to make programmes, he just about panicked, his mind went blank. The story is that he went to London and stayed there for a month, and that when he came home there was nothing he didn’t know about TV. No one knows what he got up to in London, not even I — whether, as some people maintain, he sat through Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo fifty times, or whether, as others say, he spent every single day and night at the BBC’s Broadcasting House — but I am pretty sure that there, in his mysterious fashion, he found a key to the secret of television broadcasting. However that may be, he returned to Norway possessed of a self-confidence worthy of a television Einstein. And in the first programme he made for NRK, about the Norwegian elkhound — yes, that’s right, the Norwegian elkhound — he discovered, to his heartfelt delight, or relief, what a perfect medium television was for a person like him, one with such limited abilities; he gave thanks for the fabulous stroke of luck that had led him to such an enormously suggestive medium: a single twirl of the camera and people saw a UFO, their eyes just about starting out of their heads. Jonas Wergeland had found his arena, a field in which he could become a conqueror. Despite the fact that he created a series of what were — objectively speaking — outstanding programmes, definite milestones in television history, Jonas knew something which he never told to a living souclass="underline" making television programmes was the easiest job in the world — the TV studio the perfect refuge of the mediocre. Television was the salvation of Mr Average.
What he really needed in his new career was staying power. And, as you know, Professor, if there was one thing Jonas Wergeland had plenty of, it was staying power. How many times have we had to listen to the same old stories of how thorough he was, of the time he spent touching up his programmes, eternally cutting and editing: how he was never satisfied — with the sound, the lighting, his commentary, the tempo, the very pulse. He would sit on his own, going over the drafts of programmes again and again, making notes for improvements. ‘He sat in his office long into the night,’ it was said, as if this were something remarkable, because this was NRK, and at NRK no one worked overtime, least of all if it was unpaid. But Jonas Wergeland worked on long into the night, of his own free will, because he wanted to make programmes that people would never forget.
There was another factor — unknown to most people — which lent the programme on Wilhelmsen an added personal touch. In many ways this was Jonas’s tribute to Omar Hansen: a covert attempt to clear a man’s name — a salute to a grandfather who had, after all, been a seaman for half his life and ‘sailed Wilhelmsen’ to boot. The scenes had a personal feel to them because they were coloured by his grandfather’s countless stories about the Wilhelm Wilhelmsen shipping line, all those repeated boyhood references to ‘Speed and Service’ and ‘The Wilhelmsen Style’. And whenever his grandfather made Jonas a promise he always sealed it by saying: ‘You may rely upon Wilhelmsen.’
This programme was, therefore, in large part a declaration of love for the ship, for all the names beginning with ‘T’ which were read out like an incantation in the background, like symbols from a deep-sea poem — Talleyrand, Tudor, Triton, Taurus — because even though the Norwegians never designed a Model-T, they did have their T-ships, a whole succession of them, a genuine glossary in which each ‘T’ evoked its own universe, a snippet of geography or history, and it was these potent words which Jonas Wergeland wished to remind the viewers of. Here, it was the ships which played the lead in a programme which took a loving look at the lines and the profiles of those great vessels: ‘a real Boy’s Own programme,’ people said, and everyone who has ever strolled along a quayside, taking an unadulterated, lordly delight in inspecting the boats and dreaming of faraway places, knows what they were talking about. ‘Never has a ship been captured on film with such empathy and invention, such beauty and grace,’ as one critic wrote.
Jonas made use of everything from old film footage of the ships to postcards commissioned by the company, showing those Wilhelmsen vessels which had also carried passengers: prestigious cards which Jonas himself had been given as a child by a first mate, a relative from Hvaler, and had stuck up on the wall so he could look at them and dream that he was a ship-owner and this was his proud fleet. More than anything else, though, he used model ships, the kind that are normally kept in glass cases, yard-long copies in which every detail has been conscientiously recreated, a mouth-watering sight for anyone with a liking for ships, exquisite miniatures which left one wide-eyed and wondering, like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. With the theme tune for Postbox, the shipping channel’s most popular programme, playing in the background, Jonas panned the camera lingeringly over these elegant ships, following their curves and caressing individual details, as if this were a programme about the erotic arts, not the art of engineering. And the viewers’ response, their bedazzled eyes, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Henrik Ibsen was right: Norwegians are under the spell of the sea. The ship has been Norway’s great achievement, from Viking times onwards. As the programme progressed, Jonas filled the screen with a map of the world on which the famous Wilhelmsen Lines were gradually traced across the seven seas, giving the impression of a colossal and almost incomprehensible conquest, a web, a veritable internet, a global embrace. And throughout it all, those names like points on a line — Talabot, Tabor, Tarifa, Trafalgar — as if the entire world consisted of nothing but ‘T’s. It was possibly a rather nostalgic programme, meant as a reminder of how shipping was one of the cornerstones upon which Norway’s affluent society had been built: of a quite inconceivable time when this nation had boasted the fourth largest merchant fleet in the world, but a fine reminder all the same: images that could not fail to touch the hearts of every Norwegian. These lines across the oceans were as beautiful a sight, as great a national treasure, as the Academic’s woodcarvings; the Wilhelmsen Lines were testament to the fact that a piece of artistic decoration could be carried out into the world.
Which was what made the contrast so striking. Because at the programme’s centre was a ship-owner who had lost half his fleet, seen one after another of his precious ships go down without being able to lift a finger. Jonas Wergeland was never in any doubt about which situation said most about Wilhelm Wilhelmsen, popularly referred to as the Captain. For Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was not the sort of ship-owner who loves only money, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was a ship-owner who loved boats above all else, to whom the seafaring side — the ship, the men on board — meant as much as the commercial side. His older brother may well have been a more distinguished and far-sighted ship-owner, but in Jonas Wergeland’s eyes Wilhelm was the obvious choice, epitomizing as he did the Norwegian’s relationship with the sea: a ship-owner who, like most Norwegians, put safety first — there is even a story of how once, when a mouse had nibbled a hole in a chart, Wilhelm plotted a course round the hole, just to be on the safe side. And for those same reasons of safety he decided to put his faith in something sound, on lines, to take no chances, to bank on oil; Wilhelm was a ship-owner and a seaman, an owner with fifteen years service at sea, an owner who knew the bars of Saigon and Shanghai, a man who joined the company offices as a captain, with a roll in his walk and malaria in his blood. Wilhelm Wilhelmsen’s most treasured possession was not the stable of horses he would later own nor the palatial mansion with a Chinese pagoda in the pool in the grounds but a battered, camphor-wood ship’s chest from his years at sea as a young man.