“Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast…”*
Last Friday in Norway, 1.3 million people watched strangers knit on television. For four hours they tuned in as people talked about knitting, and then they stuck around for eight and a half extra hours of actual knitting. I’m serious.
National Knitting Evening is not the first program belonging to a genre called “Slow TV”: Norway’s public TV company, NRK, is responsible for several. Its predecessors include behemoth-size studies on a train trip from Bergen to Oslo (the station’s first, in 2009, clocking in at seven hours), a cruise ship (a record-breaking five days), salmon swimming (18 hours) and a fire burning (12 hours, and very reminiscent of our nation’s own Christmas Yule Log broadcast). Norway’s population is just more than 5 million people, and more than half of them watched a cruise ship’s voyage for the better part of a week…
Read more at the always great Grantland in “Wait For It: Norway’s Slow TV Revolution.”
* Shakespeare, Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 3
###
As we take our time, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 (though some records hold that it was this date inverted– November 21) that the BBC broadcast the first televised gardening program, a special based on a radio staple: In Your Garden, hosted by C. H. Middleton– known throughout the British Isles simply as Mr. Middleton. The son of a head gardener in Northamptonshire and a gardening columnist for the Daily Mail, Mr. M, Britain’s first celebrity gardener, introduced and championed the “Dig For Victory” campaign in 1939. His Sunday afternoon program reached 3.5 million listeners, over a third of the available (licensed) audience in the U.K.
Mr, Middleton