The world's most boring television ... and why it's hilariously addictive

Thank you.

I have only got 18 minutes

to explain something that lasts for hours

and days, so I'd better get started.

Let's start with a clip

from Al Jazeera's listening post.

Narrator: Norway is a country that gets
relatively little media coverage.

Even the elections this past week
passed without much drama.

And that's the Norwegian
media in a nutshell:

not much drama.

A few years back,

Norway's public TV channel NRK

decided to broadcast live coverage

of a seven hour train ride,

seven hours of simple footage,

a train rolling down the tracks.

Norwegians, more than a million of them
according to the ratings, loved it.

A new kind of reality TV show was born,

and it goes against all the rules
of TV engagement.

There is no story line, no script,

no drama, no climax,

and it's called Slow TV.

For the past two months, Norwegians

have been watching a cruise ship's
journey up the coast,

and there's a lot of fog on that coast.

Executive's at Norway's
National Broadcasting Service

are now considering broadcasting

a night of knitting nationwide.

On the surface, it sounds boring,

because it is,

but something about this TV experiment

has gripped Norwegians.

So we sent the Listening Post's
Marcela Pizarro to Oslo

to find out what it is,
but first a warning:

viewers may find some of the images

in the following report disappointing.

(Laughter)

Thomas Hellum: And then follows
an eight-minute story on Al Jazeera

about some strange
TV programs in little Norway.

Al Jazeera. CNN. How did we get there?

We have to go back to 2009,

when one of my colleagues
got a great idea.

Where do you get your ideas?

In the lunchroom.

So he said, why don't we make

a radio program

marking the day of the German invasion

of Norway in 1940.

We tell the story at the exact time

during the night.

Wow. Brilliant idea, except

this was just a couple of weeks
before the invasion day.

So we sat in our lunchroom and discussed

what other stories

can you tell as they evolve?

What other things take a really long time?

So one of us comes up with a train,

the Bergen Railway.

Had its hundred years anniversary that year.

It goes from western Norway
to eastern Norway,

and it uses exactly the same time

as it did 40 years ago,

over seven hours.

So we caught our
commissioning editors in Oslo,

and we said, we want to make a documentary

about the Bergen Railway,

and we want to make it in full length,

and the answer was,

"Yes but how long will the program be?"

"Oh," we said, "full length."

"Yes, but we mean the program."

And back and forth.

Luckily for us,

they met us with laughter,

very, very good laughter,

so one bright day in September,

we started a program that we thought

should be seven hours and four minutes.

Actually, it turned out
to be seven hours and 40 minutes

due to a signal failure at the last station.

We had four cameras,

three of them pointing out

to the beautiful nature.

I'm talking to the guests,

some information.

Voice: We will arrive at [???] Station.

TH: And that's about it,

but of course, also

the 160 tunnels gave us the opportunity

to do some archives.

Narrator [in Norwegian]: Then a little
bit of flirti while the food is digested.

The last downhill stretch
before we reach our destination.

We pass Mjolfjell Station:

Then a new tunnel.

(Laughter)

TH: And now we thought yes,
we had a brilliant program.

It will fit for the two thousand
train spotters in Norway.

We brought it on the air in November 2009,

but no, this was far more attractive.

This is the five biggest TV channels
in Norway on a normal Friday,

and if you look at NRK2 over here,

look what happened when they put on

the Bergen Railway show:

1.2 million Norwegians
watched part of this program.

And another funny thing:

when the host on our main channel

after the [???] news for you,

she said, "And on our second channel,

the train has now
nearly reached ??? station.

Thousands of people
just jumped on the train

on our second channel like this.

This was also a huge success
in terms of social media.

It was so nice to see all thousands
of Facebook and Twitter users

discussing the same view,

talking to each other as they were

on the same train together.

And especially, I like this one.
It's a 76-year old man.

He's watched all the program,

and at the end station, he rises up

to picks up what he thinks is his luggage

and his head hit the curtain rod,

and he realized he is
in his own living room.

(Applause)

So that's strong and living TV.

436 minute by minute on a Friday night,

and during that first night,

the first Twitter message came:

why be a chicken?

Why stop at 436

when you can expand that

to 8,040, minute by minute,

and do the iconic journey in Norway,

the coastal ship journey ????

from Bergen to ????,

almost 3,000 kilometers,
covering most of our coast.

It has 120 year old,

very interesting history,

and take literally part in life
and death along the coast.

So just a week after the Bergen Railway,

we called the ???? company

and we started planning for our next show.

We wanted to do something different.

The Bergen Railway was a recorded program.

So when we sat in our editing room,

we watched this picture,
it's all the stations,

we saw this journalist.

We had called him, we had spoken to him,

and when we left the station,

he took this picture of us

and he waved to the camera,

and we thought,

what if more people knew
that we were on board that train?

Would more people show up?

What would it look like?

So we decided our next project,
it should be live.

We want this picture of us on the fjord

and on the screen at the same time.

So this is not the first time
NRK had been on board a ship.

This is back in 1964,

when the technical managers
have suits and ties

and NRK rolled all its equipment
on board a ship,

and 200 meters out of the shore,

transmitting the signal back,

and in the machine room,

they talked to the machine guy,

and on the deck, they have
splendid entertainment.

So being on a ship is not the first time.

But five and a half days in a row,

and live, we wanted some help

and we asked our viewers out there

what do you want to see?

What do you want us to film?
How do you want this to look like?

Do you want us to make a website?
What do you want on it?

And we got some answers
from you out there,

and it helped us a very lot

to build the program.

So in June 2011,

23 of us went on board
the Hurtigruten coastal ship

and we put off.

(Music)

I have some really strong memories
from that week, and it's all about people.

This guy, for instance,

he's head of research
at the University in ????

And I will show you a piece of cloth,

this one.

It's the other strong memory.

It belongs to a guy called Erik Hanson [?].

And it's people like those two

who took a firm grip of our program,

and together with thousands
of others along the route,

they made the program what it became.

They made all the stories.

This is Karl. He's in the ninth grade.

It says, "I will be a little
late for school tomorrow."

He was supposed to be
in the school at 8 a.m.

He came at 9 a.m., and he didn't
get a note from his teacher,

because the teacher
had watched the program.

How did we do this?

Yes, we took conference room

on board the Hurtigruten.

We turned it into
a complete TV control room.

We made it all work, of course,

and then we took along 11 cameras.

This is one of them.

This is my sketch from February,

and when you give this sketch
to professional people

in the Norwegian Broadcasting Company NRK

you get some cool stuff back.

And with some very creative solutions.

Voice (in Norwegian): Run it up and down.

This is Norway's most
important drill right now.

It regulates the height of a bow
camera in NRK's live production,

one of 11 that capture
great shots from the MS Nord-Norge.

Eight wires keep the camera stable.

I work on different camera solutions.

They're just tools
used in a different context.

TH: Another camera is this one.
It's normally used for sports.

It made it possible for us to take
close-up picture of people

100 kilomteres away,

like this one.

People called us and asked,

how is this man doing?

He's doing fine. Everything went well.

We also could take pictures of
people waving at us,

people along the route,
thousands of them,

and they all had a phone in their hand.

And when you take a picture of them,
and they get the message,

"Now we are on TV, dad,"
they start waving back.

This was waving TV for five and a half days,

and people get so extremely happy

when they can send a warm message

to their loved ones.

It was also a great success
on social media.

On the last day, we met
Her Majesty the Queen of Norway,

and Twitter couldn't quite handle it.

And we also, on the web,

during this week we streamed

more than 100 years of video

to 148 nations,

and the websites are still there

and they will be forever, actually.

because Hurtigruten was selected

to be part of the Norwegian
UNESCO list of documents,

and it's also in
the Guinness Book of Records

as the longest documentary ever.

(Applause)

Thank you.

But it's a long program

so some watch part of it,
like the Prime Minister.

Some watched a little bit more.

It says, "I haven't used
my bed for five days."

And he's 82 years old,
and he hardly slept.

He kept watching because
something might happen,

though it probably won't.

This is the number
of viewers along the route.

You can see the famous ????

and a day after, all time high for NRK2.

If you see the four biggest
channels in Norway

during June 2011,

they will look like this,

and as a TV producer, it's a pleasure

to put Hurtigruten on top of it,

looks like this:

3.2 million Norwegians
watched part of this program,

and there are only five million here.

Even the passengers on board
the Hurtigruten coastal ship,

they choose to watched the telly

instead of turning 90 degrees

and watching out the window.

So we were allowed to be part

in people's living room

with this strange TV program,

with music, nature, people,

and Slow TV was now a buzzword,

and we started looking for other things

we could make Slow TV about.

So we could either take something long
and make it a topic,

like with the railway and the Hurtigruten,

or we could take a topic and make it long.

This is the last project.
It's the peep show.

It's 14 hours of bird-watching
on a TV screen,

actually 87 days on the web.

We have made 18 hours
of live salmon fishing.

It actually took three hours
before we got the first fish,

and that's quite slow.

We have made 12 hours of boat ride

into the beautiful Telemark Channel,

and we have made another train ride

with the northern railway,

and because this we couldn't do live,

we did it in four seasons

just to give the viewer

another experience on the way.

So our next project got us
some attention outside Norway.

This is from the Colbert Report
on Comedy Centeral.

Stephen Colbert (Video): I've got my eye
on a wildly popular program from Norway

called "National Firewood Night"

which consisted of mostly people in parkas
chatting and chopping in the woods,

and then eight hours of
a fire burning in a fireplace.

It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows

like "So You Think
You Can Watch Paint Dry"

and "The Amazing Glacier Race."

And get this, almost 20 percent

of the Norwegian population tuned in,

20 percent.

TH: So, when wood fire and wood chopping
can be that interesting,

why not knitting?

So on our next project,

we used more than eight hours

to go live from a sheep to a sweater,

and Jimmy Kimmel in the ABC show,

he liked that.

(Music)

Jimmy Kimmel (Video): Even the people
on the show are falling asleep,

and after all that,
the knitters actually failed

to break the world record.

They did not succeed,

but remember the old Norwegian saying,

it's not whether you win
or lose that counts.

In fact, nothing counts,
and death is coming for us all.

TH: Exactly. So why does this stand out?

This is so completely different
to other TV programming.

We take the viewer on a journey

that happens right now in real time,

and the viewer gets the feeling
of actually being there,

actually being on the train, on the boat,

and knitting together with others,

and the reason I think
why they're doing that

is because we don't edit the timeline.

It's important that
we don't edit the timeline,

and it's also important

that what we make Slow TV about

is something that we all can relate to,

that the viewer can relate to,

and it somehow has a root in our culture.

This is a picture from last summer

when we traveled the coast
again for seven weeks,

and of course this is a lot of planning.

This is a lot of logistics,

so this is the working plan
for 150 people last summer,

but more important is what you don't plan.

You don't plan what's going to happen.

You have to just
take your cameras with you.

It's like a sports event.

You rig them and you see what's happening.

So this is actually
the whole running order

for Hurtigruten, 134 hours

just written one page.

We didn't know anything more
when we left Bergen.

So you have to let the viewer
make the stories themselves,

and I'll give you an example of that.

This is from last summer,

and as a TV producer,

it's a nice picture, but now
you can cut to the next one.

But this is Slow TV,

so you have to keep this picture

until it really starts
hurting your stomach,

and then you keep it a little bit longer,

and when you keep it that long,

I'm sure some of you now
have noticed the cow.

Some of you have seen the flag.

Some of you start wondering
is the farmer at home?

Has he left? Are you watching the cow?

And where is that cow going?

So my point is, the longer
you keep a picture like this,

and we kept it for 10 minutes,

you start making
the stories in your own head.

That's Slow TV.

So we think that Slow TV is
one nice way of telling a TV story,

and we think that we
can continue doing it,

not too often, once or twice a year,

so we keep the feeling of event,

and we also think that
the good Slow TV idea,

that's the idea when people say,

"Oh no, you can't put that on TV."

When people smile, it might be
a very good slow idea,

so after all, life is best

when it's a bit strange.

Thank you.

(Applause)