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Radio station streams toilet in Slow TV gag

The Local Norway
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Radio station streams toilet in Slow TV gag
The offending toilet. Photo: Solor Radio

A Norwegian radio station on Thursday started streaming live footage of a toilet dumped on a roundabout, in a light-hearted version of the Slow TV broadcasts pioneered by the country's NRK channel.

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"We have been inspired by NRK's very successful minute-by-minute productions and created our own twist," Andreas Krantz, a presenter at Solør Radio, told Norway's national television channel NRK. "We are streaming the abandoned bog minute-by-minute until the municipality removes it." 
 
Bjørn Martin Brandett, a producer at the station, said that said the broadcast was a protest against the local municipality's slow progress at removing the porcelain eye-sore. 
 
"I've driven to work every morning for six days and seen this crapper at the roundabout every day, so I thought that now we'd do our social duty and put some focus on it," he said. 
 
He said he suspected that the toilet bowl had been left by high school students taking part in the notorious "Russ Celebration", which sees final year students drunkenly rampage through their home towns from 1 May to 17 May, dressed in costumes. 
 
The broadcast began at 8am on Thursday morning, but only continued for one hour and twenty minutes before a pick-up truck arrived and took it away. 
 
"I've seen this loo out here since the 17 of May," Ole Jonny Johnsen, the driver, told NRK. "To be honest, I think the Russ could have cleaned it up. But as the municipality obviously can not afford it either, I thought I'd better clear it," he told NRK. 
 
Norway's experimentation with Slow TV began in 2009 with the centenary of the Bergen railway line. 
 
Rather than commission a conventional feature programme, NRK instead decided to stick a camera on a train and broadcast the entire seven-hour trip from Oslo to Bergen. It was a roaring success, with 1.2 million viewers, nearly a quarter of the population of Norway, tuning in for at least part of the trip.
 
Since then, the network has broadcast a cruise journey, a fire being slowly built and burned, and most recently, the knitting of a jumper, starting with the original sheep. 

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