Northumberland and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The Norwegian Connection

20th December 2023

(Updated 28th January 2024)

Dear Readers

Viewers of Regional TV who live in the more northerly parts of North East England are interested in happenings locally. However, wider regional connections (certainly up to an hour’s travel time away) do have salience with viewers, particularly when folk have contacts through work or places that they like to travel to on holidays.

A country that may be of interest to folk living and working in northern North East England who may travel, but not far for short breaks, is Norway. This does have some bearing on local and regional TV-news as watched by viewers. No national or regional TV news-broadcaster anywhere in the UK, not even those serving Northumberland and Tyneside, recognise that the most northerly and north-easterly parts of the United Kingdom have Nordic links due to relative proximity to Scandinavia.

I have discussed on this site the importance for folk living in northern Northumberland of the links northwards into Scotland and towards Edinburgh. I discussed this with regards to the relevance of Scottish Borders and Lothian news-coverage for North Northumbrian viewers of Regional TV (you can find this article here: https://looknorthmustlooknorth.org/2023/08/24/over-one-hundred-berwickers-should-switch-to-bbc1-reporting-scotland-to-put-real-pressure-on-boycott-the-non-local-north-east-england-regional-tv/). However, it is not just links with Scotland that Northumbrians may have.

North East of the North East

If one looks at a map of the United Kingdom the Northumberland Coast juts a little way north-east around Alnmouth and Seahouses with the curve of the coastline then moving north-westerly north of Berwick-upon-Tweed and over the Border into Scotland. The Farne Islands and Holy Island represent a few miles of extension of Northumberland north-eastwards. The eastern end of The Farne Islands is not only over fifty miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne by car, but it’s also about two miles east of Newcastle City-centre too.

This brings us to a significant point: Few parts of the United Kingdom are actually north-east of where most folk live across northern North East England. The vast bulk of Scotland is north-west of the populated parts of Northumberland. Much of Dumfries and Galloway is actually over 100 miles south-west of northernmost Northumberland, and over 100 miles west of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. From Tyneside one travels west along the A69 to Carlisle, goes north onto the M6 for just ten miles to Gretna, then west-southwest on the A75 to towns like Kirkcudbright and Stranraer. Only the Shetland Isles, over 350 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is the one part of Scotland slightly east of due north from places like Alnmouth on the Northumberland Coast.

North-eastwards of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Northumberland Coast is the North Sea, and to all intends and purposes one hits the North Sea moving due north from coastal North East England too. This may be assumed to mark a firm boundary between North East England and what is at the other side of the North Sea. The North East of England is aptly named, and can be referred to simply as the North East or North East Britain too: There is no other significant land areas that are part of the United Kingdom that are further to the north-east than Tyneside and the Northumberland Coast. But the North Sea is not an impenetrable barrier and for years local fishermen have traded from towns along the Northumberland Coast. Since the 1970’s and the discovery of North Sea oil many Northumbrian men were employed on oil-rigs far out in the North Sea.

North-eastwards of the North Sea lies the country of Norway, which extends from the latitude of Aberdeen in the south up to north of the Arctic Circle. It is just 363 miles as the crow flies from Berwick-upon-Tweed in northernmost Northumberland to Stavanger on the south-west Norwegian coast (Doogal Measure Distances site: https://www.doogal.co.uk/MeasureDistances). The relatively short distance across the North Sea could be traversed in a small boat in just 24 hours. The south-west coast of Norway is closer to coastal North Northumberland than the coast of Cornwall as the crow flies. It is possible to fly direct from Newcastle Airport to Bergen in south-west Norway with a flight time of no more than one hour and 30 minutes. This compares with one hour and 15 minutes for the flight from Newcastle to Exeter. If one allows ninety minutes for checking-in, going to the departure gate plus thirty minutes getting to Newcastle Airport, the three-and-a-half hours travel time to get to Bergen compares favourably with the three hours to get to London by train. Three hours is the sort of travel time one would make to go on a short break for a few days.

In the past there was also a daily ferry-service across the North Sea linking Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Stavanger and Bergen in Norway (details of this historical ferry-service are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle%E2%80%93Bergen%E2%80%93Stavanger_ferry). Sadly, as of 2008, this ferry-service has no longer been running. However, there are plans by a company called Bergen Cruise Lines to reinstate it from 2026 (details here: https://bergencruiseline.no/).

Northumbrian Links with Norway

The relatively close proximity of Norway to North East England is reflected in the Norse influence historically across the region. This is evident in the Geordie dialect with some local words used being closer to Norwegian than English in the Northumbrian vocabulary used. Examples are:

• A stream is referred to a beck: The Norwegian is bekk.
• An area of high ground or a moor is referred to a fell: The Norwegian word is fjellet.
• A child is often called a bairn in Northumbrian dialect. The Norwegian word is barnet (or barn for more than one child)
• A church is sometimes called a kirke in Northumberland. The Norwegian is en kirke (or kirken for the church).
• The words for “a long way” in Geordie is often “a lang wai“. The Norwegian is lang vei (the “v” is pronounced like a “w” in Norwegian).
• The word go, as in to go in Geordie is pronounced gan. The Norwegian is gå (pronounced gau).

It is a crude one-size-fits-all that all children at secondary school in England, including those in Northumberland, are governed by the same national Education system that would have them learn French or Spanish. That’s if youngsters do a foreign language as part of their studies at all. This is not so appropriate for north-easternmost parts of Britain where the nearest neighbouring country other than Scotland is Norway, not France.

The links that North East England has with Norway, and other parts of Scandinavia are evident in other ways too. The local folk working on oil-rigs in the North Sea sometimes worked with Norwegian colleagues. This is not surprising since both Norwegian and Northumbrian companies were involved in prospecting for oil, especially during the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Relevance of the Norwegian Link in Regional TV coverage.

Neither BBC1 Look North (NE/ Cumbria) nor ITV1 News Tyne Tees seem to recognise in any way the fact that North East England has special links with Norway more than most other parts of Britain by virtue of geographical proximity. On the occasions that they do, it is incidental. One recent example was the coverage of grieving families in relation to the Alexander Keilland oil-rig tragedy in the Norwegian section of the North Sea in March 1980. This was only covered on BBC1 Look North in early September because two men from Cleator Moor (in Cumbria) lost their father, Keith Hunter. Brothers Wayne and Alan Hunter travelled to the inquest in Stavanger, south-west Norway, seeking answers from the Norwegian government.

Programmers are not mindful of these links and consider that all news outside of UK waters is foreign, and would only feature in the main national and international news-bulletins if it was serious enough to warrant coverage. That is to assume that folk living in coastal Northumberland have very little interest in Scandianavian affairs, certainly not more than folk living on the South coast of England or in London. Enough has been illustrated here, not least the interest in re-establishing the Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Stavanger ferry service, to show that that is patently not true.

With all that said, the non-coverage of Norway in any Regional TV output is not as bad as when folk living in northernmost Northumberland don’t get coverage of significant happenings just across the Scottish Border in places like Duns and Eyemouth (less than half an hour’s drive away). The fact that over 300 miles of North Sea separates the Northumberland Coast from coastal Vestlandet (south-west Norway) means that what happens in coastal Vestlandet is not local to Northumbrian viewers at all. However, Northumbrian viewers are subjected to national news (almost half an hour of it) which is often about London and the extreme south and south-west of England. Northumbrians would still agree that they are part of Britain and would therefore expect national news about Britain. Even so, northern North East England does have links with Norway, particularly through the North Sea oil-industry and fishing. People do travel to Norway from Tyneside and Northumberland on short breaks because it is a beautiful country with glaciers and snow-capped mountains in all seasons. These links are historical and deep-rooted, with enough Norwegian words in the Geordie and Northumbrian dialect, to warrant some topical coverage in local and Regional TV news- output serving North East England.

Proud Northumbrian viewers, proud of their North East identity, would like their north-easterly latitude affirmed with the odd news-report concerning their Nordic links. The odd feature covering Norway as a short-break destination would be appreciated. Western Norway is not far, no further than Devon from coastal Northumberland. Thus showing a bit of Norwegian summer ice to add a bit of zing and additional affirmation of latitude would enthuse viewers. It is right to give proud Northumbrian viewers a sense of Real Northern News: They dislike news from far south of them, but News from the North of them makes them feel very proud and Northern – in the big boys’ class! This means that proud Northernmost English viewers are happy to have some news related to places even further North. It would attract more Northumbrian viewers who would love their unique North-Eastern latitude Bigged-up. With regards to ITV1 News Tyne Tees at least, this means more advertising revenue for ITV.Plc so it’s a win-win all round.

This is not to say that there should be regular coverage of Norway in regional TV bulletins for North East England. However, the odd news-feature on the North East’s Nordic connection (maybe several times a year) would enthuse viewers. The odd special documentary on aspects of Northern Britain’s Norwegian links- only available with Scottish and North East England Regional TV programming would remind millions of viewers of the uniqueness of their northern status compared to the rest of the United Kingdom!

If Northumbrian viewers feel strongly about this, perhaps if they visit Norway regularly or have family and friends who live there, they can always drop BBC1 Look North (NE/ Cumbria) a line at: look.north.comment@bbc.co.uk. To contact ITV1 News Tyne Tees on this matter email them at amyandian@itv.com. The email address is thus to contact Amy Lea and Ian Payne who not only front ITV1 News Tyne Tees but they also front ITV1 Border Lookaround. These news-readers should therefore, above all others, appreciate the need for news-overlap into the country to the north (or north-east) for the TV Region at the northernmost margins of England.

If that fails, one can always watch the Regional TV News for Vestlandet, south-west Norway via the Internet (the link is here: https://tv.nrk.no/serie/distriktsnyheter-vestlandsrevyen). One might be fluent in Geordie but even a born-and-bred Geordie might struggle to understand the Norwegian, which is what this Vestlandet Regional News is broadcast in. There are some similarities with the words, and if you can catch the gist of what is reported on Distriktsnyheter-Vestlandsrevyen – and one feels the need to watch it, do drop the North East’s Regional TV broadcasters a line to explain why it is considered necessary!