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Channelling The Slow

06 June, 2016

The rate at which we consume media is getting out of hand. Content is put on a plate for us in such a way that we gorge on it. From Buzzfeed listicles to Netflix bingeing, it’s difficult to see where any fulfilment comes from when we’re constantly moving on to the next item. However, there is an alternative: Slow TV is respite from the high-octane television we’re used to, offering marathon coverage of ordinary events. Slow TV storyboards are organic and progressive, as opposed to the scene-hopping television we’re accustomed to. Very little happens, but that’s kind of the point. Slow TV offers a more subdued, introspective and personal type of experience; it’s the quiet antithesis of how content has been evolving.

Half of Norway’s population tuned in to a 134 hour programme tracking a cruise ship.

Those who’ve missed Slow TV’s very steady emergence have been appropriately slow on the uptake. Since 2009, Norway has been producing prime-time television that typically lasts anywhere between five hours and five days. Norway’s inaugural Slow TV offering, Bergensbanen, was a seven-hour, minute-by- minute train journey, and it was uncharted television territory. Norway’s public broadcaster NRK considered not what would be risked by doing this, but what would be risked by not doing this. It aired the programme at prime time on a Friday night and 1.2 million Norwegians tuned in, gaining the broadcaster a market share of 15%.

“An uninterrupted timeline is just a basic way of telling a story,” explains Thomas Hellum, the award-winning television producer behind NRK’s Slow TV movement. “Sometimes content doesn’t have to be more difficult than making an engaging story. The viewer can think: what’s around the next curve? Where do we come out of this tunnel? What could possibly happen? Probably nothing will happen, but you never know.”

Two years later 2.54 million of Norway’s five million population tuned in for Hurtigruten, a 134-hour live stream of one of Norway’s most famous cruises. The broadcast set the world record for the longest live television documentary. “We choose to make Slow TV about things that are somehow rooted in Norwegian culture; stories that are worth telling,” says Hellum. “That way we engage a broad audience.” The stories, he adds, need to have facts and content that make good visual television.

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