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Norwegian public broadcasters will be rebooting the venerable entertainment property "staring at a fire" in a 12-hour prime-time television broadcast of a burning fireplace, featuring "Norway's biggest firewood celebrity" and other experts providing advice, color commentary, and, one hopes, some play-by-play action.
"We'll talk about the very nerdy subjects like burning, slicing and stacking the wood, but we'll also have cultural segments with music and poems," Rune Moeklebust, a producer for state broadcaster NRK.
"It will be very slow but noble television."
Moeklebust was inspired by Lars Mytting's book about firewood Hel Ved, and Mytting—in the words of Reuters, "Norway's biggest firewood celebrity"—will be a guest on the show. The special follows in the footsteps of other, actual Norwegian public television specials like "134 hours non-stop of a cruise ship going up the Norwegian coast to the Arctic" (which 3.2 million people watched in total) and "an eight hour train journey from Oslo to Bergen," which was later repeated.
Staring at fire was originally developed as an entertainment property by cavemen, and had an impressive, multi-millennia run as the number-one method of entertainment during primetime hours across several demographics before being superseded by television. Advertisers and media buyers should take note of fire's ubiquity, high Q score, and sexy sense of danger when considering how to best take advantage of increasingly popular Scandinavian television shows.
