Sunday, November 10, 2013

THOSE CRAZY, WONDERFUL NORWEGIANS

Soon it will not only be sweeping the nation, but also the whole wide world..  I speak of the phenomenon called Slow TV.  I'm not sure who started it, but the Norwegians, bless their sweet Scandinavian souls, have taken it to a new level.  It is practically an art from with them. 

The basic concept is simple enough to grasp.  A TV network chooses an event and televises the entire thing, preferably live, and hopes that a sizeable audience will tune in to watch.  Now when I say event, I'm not talking about a hundred meter dash, or the Kentucky Derby or even a whole baseball game.  These would take around ten seconds, two minutes and two and a half hours, respectively.  None of these are what Slow TV is about.  Slow TV would focus on an event that lasts at least five hours with no limit to the maximum.  You take a camera and you stick it out the window of a train going from Chicago to New York and you televise it live.  That's Slow TV.  Or you put the camera in the front of a canoe and this camera slowly rotates 180 degrees back and forth and someone paddles this canoe from the beginning of the Mississippi River way up in Minnesota to the very end in Louisiana.  That's Extreme Slow TV.  Now I know what you're thinking.  Who the heck is going to watch that?  Well, the Norwegians have done exactly this, only in Norway, of course.  And the audience response was incredible.  Absolutely spectacular ratings.  More than half the country tuned in to watch some of the train and boat rides at some point in the telecast.  They even televised a burning fireplace for five hours and had Christmas Carols playing in the background.  Once again, the Norwegian viewers did not disappoint.  They tuned in to watch in droves.

So why would I write about this radical new concept in television broadcasting in my knitting blog?  What exactly does this have to do with knitting?  Well, isn't it obvious?  Here's my idea.  You take a few sheep that are ready to be sheared.  You shear them.  You clean the wool. You spin the raw wool into yarn.  You dye the yarn,  You let the yarn dry,  You knit  a sweater out of the wool.  There's your show.  I  don't know about you, but I would certainly tune in and watch this.  At least for a little bit.  Except for watching the just-dyed yarn dry, there is always something exciting going on.  The whole concept sounds like it would be absolutely breathtaking.  Well guess what?  THE NORWEGIANS HAVE ALREADY DONE THIS!  HA, HA!!  You heard right.  They recently televised like a nine hour show where, except for the dyeing and drying of the yarn, the audience watched the creation of a sweater from the first clip of the sheep's wool to the very last sewn seam of the completed knit sweater.  The ratings are not in yet.  But I bet they were out of this world.

I will do some research and see if there is a DVD available of this earth-shattering event.  I will then try to convince Cathy to sell copies of this nine hour extravaganza at the store.  I bet these DVD's will sell like hotcakes.  If not, we will sell the edited version which only shows the highlights  This abbreviated DVD will only be five hours long.  Reserve your copy today.