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.
They had even less idea of the more long-term effect. Not only was the series showered with awards, including the Prix Italia — for the programme on Armauer Hansen — other countries also evinced an exceptionally voracious interest with the result that a number of television networks bought all or part of the series, even some Third World countries were anxious to screen a few of the programmes. Teachers wrote candid articles in which they described how the series had given them a shot in the arm. Company directors and others spoke out in the newspapers and at seminars, claiming that the series had inspired them. From the lectern in Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament, politicians announced that these programmes had boosted the self-confidence of the nation as a whole.
Again: why? And again: not one study has succeeded in solving the mystery.
Throughout Norway people like Nora Næs from the town of Bryne in Jæren watched those programmes over and over again, and not only that: Nora Næss bought records of music she had never heard, she borrowed books from the libraries, biographies, novels as if the programmes were by no means finished when she switched off the television; she visited museums and galleries, she went to see hitherto unknown films and, during a trip to Oslo, she took out her old figure-skates and went out on the ice for the first time in twenty-five years, together with her daughter; she made excursions to parts of Norway she had never seen, she even travelled abroad several times. Jonas Wergeland received hundreds of postcards, addressed to NRK, from Cairo and the Great Pyramid of Cheops, from Bihar in India, from Stamford Bridge in England. Nora Næss sent him a card showing Saint Peter’s in Rome. ‘I felt as if I was being seduced,’ she told a friend, in strictest confidence, some time later. ‘Of being taken by the hand and led somewhere I had never been.’
And in her heart of hearts Nora Næss could not deny, any more than Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum could, that she eventually became as obsessed with Jonas Wergeland as she was with those celebrated Norwegian men and women. Ultimately, she watched and interpreted the stories of the individuals featured in the television series as extracts from Jonas Wergeland’s own life, with the result that the more she learned about those other people the more she wanted to know about Jonas Wergeland. And so, in spite of this unique and in many ways historic television project, not even Jonas Wergeland was able to prevent the whole thing, in the end, from revolving around him personally.