Fenna wanted to tell fun facts about pigeons, Judith wanted to contact the anonymous hunk she had met at a hardcore festival and dance group Bumfidence wanted to twerk heavily for an audience of extremely respectable people who had probably never heard of twerking. They looked with silent amazement at all those bouncing buttocks; only when the last buttock had been shaken out did they part their arms for hesitant applause. “That’s it again,” presenter Raven van Dorst shouted over the live music. “We’ll be back next week with ‘Pearls before swine’.” Van Dorst then determinedly approached the ladies of Bumfidence to participate in a small twerk encore.
Started last week Pearls before swine (BNNVARA) for a second season, the second episode was shown on Sunday. The design of the program is as simple as it is rare: unknown Dutch people are given a stage live on TV to share what concerns them. These are “people we don’t usually get to see or hear from,” says Van Dorst himself. There are no further criteria.
The participants sing self-written songs about their family’s war past, read a letter to a family member who died young or, as mentioned, give a quick speech about pigeons. The music is provided by bands that have not (yet) broken through, and there is always someone behind the bar that you would not have expected behind the bar. On Sunday, for example, it was Abel, who suffers from spasms and Tourette’s and still aspires to a job as a barista. In his wheelchair, Abel drove around the audience to provide everyone with a drink. That audience sat on hay bales: the recordings are made on a farm. Every now and then a goat or a large chicken walks through the image. They are also welcome Pearls before swine.
The result is chaos in the best sense of the word. You can tell that from the titles of the episodes – the most recent one is called: ‘Spasm, NSB & Booty Shake’. Coherence is not required. One moment a road worker without arms and legs talks about a crowdfunding he started to be able to continue doing his work, the next moment composition artist Wilma makes a sketch of Judith’s dream man. Judith didn’t think the resemblance between the sketch and the hardcore hunk was huge, but she still looked happy with this attempt to help.
A bridge
With other live programs you sometimes hope for more coherence between the themes. Bee WNL on Sunday Defense Minister Dilan Yesilgöz sat on Sunday morning. With her, Rick Nieman first wanted to reflect on Remembrance Day and on bad misinformation circulating online about the Second World War. Then he wanted to discuss the latest news with her about the anti-azc riots. “Is it perhaps also because people, such as in Loosdrecht, are often only informed very late about the fact that asylum seekers will be housed in their neighborhood?” Yes, those present thought: that’s what it came down to. They also agreed that “the inflow” had to be reduced. And that didn’t work, because parties had voted against the new asylum laws.
“Who can blame you for that?” Nieman wanted to know. “Parties that vote against.” “Which ones in particular?” Yesilgöz sighed. “Everyone in The Hague sees that this is going on. That support has really run out.” The support base was, in addition to, also “destroyed”, and it would only become “worse and worse”. A bridge back to the previous item would not have been out of place, but the next item was already ready. Could we still go on a flying holiday this summer? Perhaps these episodes can also be given a title on NPO start. Sunday’s could be called: ‘World War II, Migration & Flying Holidays’.
