The second royal programme of the evening is on TV2, and the concept is that two Norwegian television evening-show hosts visit the Crown Prince family at their summer house outside Kristiansand.
At first, the programme fell a bit flat for me. The concept felt very artificial, and there was a certain stiffness both to hosts and the family when they first stopped by. There was a bit of wet clothes on the hosts, and they had to change into something they borrowed from Haakon for the first while. There was a bit of wind-surfing lessons from Haakon, and Ingrid Alexandra showed them around the parrot room (so called because all of the parrots on the walls, and a stuffed parrot Mette-Marit had found in Paris.)
However, once they sat down and began to talk, the show picked up. There were funny moments, when Haakon and Mette-Marit told the tale of a time of a visit to a small place when Haakon had to do a speech when he didn’t know that beforehand. You know that a speech will be bad when they start to praise the breakfast in the official speech, and have nothing else to say.
Mette-Marit said that one of the more difficult things about marrying into the royal family was losing her right to vote.
They also mentioned that there wasn’t a difficulty in letting Marius, Mette-Marit’s son from before, know the difference between him and Ingrid in royal duties, but as he was in his teens now… it was more difficult getting him to come to the family occasions that he has to be a part of – and that would be more difficult as time went on.
The hosts also split them up, and had them tell the story of how they met, what they don’t like about each other after ten years of marriage (Haakon: That she can be very insistent about things, even when she isn’t right, MM: That he’s so slow, and we’re always late when he’s coming along, and that he has no sense of directions when driving) .
There was a bun-making competition, which Haakon and Mette-Marit won with blind judging by Ingrid Alexandra and Magnus.
All in all, it was an entertaining programme, with some new revelations here and there.
