Maatstaf. Jaargang 32

[p. 109]

Ethel Portnoy Gerrit Komrij and Dutch television

For one whole year, in 1976, Gerrit Komrij watched Dutch television. What heroism! Evening after evening, he allowed even the most awful spectacles - the kind we never watch - to trek past his weary eyes. In a column in nrc Handelsblad he recorded his experiences. Komrij on tv: it was like letting a lion loose on a mechanical mouse.

I read those columns with delight and approbation when they first appeared, and I have just read them again, gathered together in his book Horen, Zien en Zwijgen. Eight years have gone by; you would think that therefore such a book would hardly be of interest, let alone intelligible. The awful, the frightening truth is that now, nearly a decade later, nothing has changed. Komrij's criticism of Dutch tv is just as valid today as it was then. Such is the inertia of Dutch tv that the same miserable cast of characters, the ‘stars’, the makers of programs, are as firmly in the saddle as ever. The quiz-shows, the schlagers, the discussions about pseudo-problems, the talking heads of politicians, all are still there. Even Loekie the Lion is still with us, having achieved by now the status of a monopoly. Will he never go with the vut and leave some room for some new talent in the world of the Dutch cartoon?

What most people don't realize is that architecture and television, which are relevant to our daily lives, should be approached as seriously as any conventional political issues. In this sense Komrij is a truly ‘engaged’ writer, not to say an agitator, a revolutionary.

For, whenever a revolution takes place, the tv and radio are the first to be seized. And that is what Komrij urges us to do. Television belongs to the people, he keeps hammering at us; it is something we have tended to forget. It is we, with our taxes and kijkgeld, who are supporting and paying for Dutch television. We own it, but this is one of the few areas of Dutch life over which we have no control. There is no ombudsman for tv-viewers. Oh, we can sign petitions to start new production-groups or gain more time for the existing ones - but as for having any say as to what is shown, forget it. Television is handed down from above, and we can only say amen. When the tv-bosses in Hilversum pocket huge salaries for doing nothing, where can we get redress? Who names these people? How can we affect or question such nominations? The Dutch tv is a closed shop, an old-boy network, with one mediocrity bringing in the next: a safe state of affairs. Sums as large as those implicated in the rsv scandal are involved, but not a soul says ho maar.

In a satirical talk-show on the vpro, the only Dutch production-group with the least spark of verve or originality, Komrij dared to criticize the medium on the very medium itself. What a blast of fresh air that was. Unheard of! And what was the reaction of his fellow-critics the following day? They didn't respond to what Komrij had said, but instead criticized the way he had said it.

What's more, when they convened to award the Nipkow-schijf for 1976, they did not invite Komrij, under the pretext that he wasn't a full-fledged tv-critic because he did something else in life besides. The mind boggles! What would one of England's best tv-critics, the poet Clive Ja-

[p. 110]

mes, have said about that one?

For his columns about tv, Komrij was attacked, reviled. Not only by tv-makers, who of course represent a vested interest - but also by his fellow-critics, and even by the readers of the nrc, which printed their angry letters on its editorial page. It was as if those readers didn't see Komrij's criticism of the Dutch tv as an attack upon a petrified institution, but as an attack against themselves.

The Dutch, it seems, will put up with anything. They will eat tasteless tomatoes, they will allow hideous buildings to be erected all over the place, they will swallow any rubbish shoveled forth by their television, and they will never complain.

‘Ridicule is the best weapon.’ ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ Not in Holland! Komrij? Didn't he rant for a while about tv on the back page of the nrc? Such is the disdain with which the Dutch treat their intellectuals.

As it turned out, it was not Komrij who dealt the death-blow to Dutch tv, it was the advent of the cables. Television has now become a veritable supermarket, and comparison-shopping is the order of the day. When one can see with one's own eyes that even the Belgian tv is better than the Dutch, under such circumstances who wants to look at Dutch tv any more? When one can get in The Hague 3 transmitters from England, 3 from Germany, 3 from Belgium, 1 from France, plus a satellite, the scales fall from one's eyes all by themselves. The only fly in the ointment to living in Holland, I used to think, was the Dutch tv. From the moment I got the bbc, I never looked back.

Komrij was not taken seriously, although there was time enough to do so. And now the day of retribution has arrived. Two buttons on everybody's set have started to gather dust. Guess which buttons they are?