Hurtigruten: 5 Day TV marathon in the Midnight Sun
Norwegian Public Service broadcaster NRK transmitted the 134 hour boat trip from Bergen to Kirkenes live and non stop, starting last Thursday June 16 at 19:45 CET.
For those curious if 134 hours of television is a Guinness World Record, it's not? It can’t compete with the 8,763 hours of a Big Brother show. But it’s still pretty long and close to double the world record for uninterrupted TV watching, so this show should be prime material to set your own world records
The live stream is available at nrk.no/hurtigruten from Thursday June 16th 2011 until the ship lands in Kirkenes Wednesday June 22nd. Info on how to download etc. can be found there as well.
8040 minutes of sea and arctic nature
Hurtigruten, the Norwegian Express Line, has for well over 100 years been the backbone of coastal Norway, bringing people and goods up and down the weatherbeaten west coast towards the north of Norway. A fleet of 11 ships service 34 ports from Bergen to Kirkenes, covering a distance comparable to the distance Oslo – Tunisia. Daily, and all year round, regardless of weather. In its heyday, this earned the line its nickname National Highway 1.
With the advent of air transport and roads, the goods and the local travellers aboard have gradually been replaced by tourists coming to explore the fjords and expanses of largely untouched arctic nature in the comfort of cruise ship-like amenities. Comfort except for the sea temperature and the possible range of weather, that is.
Watching Paint Dry – Live on TV
Does this trip makes for brilliant live transmitted television? Five and a half days of rolling sea, with a ship crawling slowly northwards through the changing seascape, just briefly interrupted by a little less than six daily stops for loading and unloading?
Well, we wouldn’t have thought as much until one and a half year ago. That’s when we did a TV show covering the train trip from Oslo to Bergen – 7 hours 16 minutes, across mountains and through forests and long tunnels – in real time. It turned out to be NRK2′s most watched show ever – with a healthy margin: 30 % of Norway’s entire TV population dropped in during the transmission. Several of them even wrote to tell us they loved it.
No sleep ’til Hammerfest
But. The voyage of Hurtigruten is 18 times as long as the train trip – 134 hours, making it close to humanly impossible, even for hardcore insomniacs, to watch the entire trip. And even before the ship reaches the midnight sun (the sun is up 24/7 as soon as the ship crosses the Polar Circle Sunday morning), the Scandinavian night will be so light it will be hard to excuse a quick nap by grumbling “too dark to see anything”.
(Source: NRKbeta.no; http://nrkbeta.no/2011/06/16/hurtigruten-eng/)
