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’.