Searching through old papers, I came across part of the oeuvre of the recently deceased program maker Wim Kayzer. It concerned the transcription of his TV series Painstaking and desperate, broadcast by the VPRO in 1989 (!). I began to read – to the gloomy end.
At the same time I realized again that Kayzer was the most important program maker of his time. What he achieved was unique, also from an international perspective. Such in-depth TV conversations with such reputable intellectuals – it had never been seen before. Even after 2002, when Kayzer stopped working, this has not happened at this level, although the VPRO came up with Summer guests sometimes nearby.
Painstaking and Desperate was the first of a series of multi-part so-called television narratives in which Kayzer subjected his interlocutors to a moral cross-examination. He did so respectfully, but never submissively. Other episodes were called A brilliant accident (1993), Familiar and oh so strange (1995) and Of beauty and comfort (2000).
For Painstaking and desperate Kayzer visited the writers Gabriel García Márquez, George Steiner, Jorge Semprun and György Konrád. For days he talked with them about their lives, in which wars, religion, ideology, the meaning of life were central. “No cloying, Calvinist jerks,” Kayzer said in the VPRO Guide“but people with allure and therefore willing to talk about their traumas and their mistakes.”
Only Márquez did not last. “This will be your last question,” he said suddenly. Why? Márquez: “I think that it is enough and that there are more sophisticated torture methods than this. […] I will never give a TV interview again. I am utterly exhausted.”
The other three writers, on the other hand, seemed to blossom more and more in the attention of their interviewer. “I believe in absolute moral values,” says Semprun. “Name two,” Kayzer responds. It will be three. The supreme moral value for Semprun is the defense of freedom, which may even require you to kill someone. Then: “Humiliating the weak is absolutely intolerable.” Finally: “The respect for the life of a child. Respect for all that is youth. By that I don’t just mean his physical existence, but his feelings, his upbringing, everything a child is, as a complex, mysterious being.”
Kayzer’s interlocutors were often gloomy. Steiner recalls that Russia and America did not intervene when Pol Pot murdered three million people in Cambodia. “Nothing happened. We watched television, we went out to dinner or to the theater, a movie was made about it, The Killing Fieldsbut nothing was done about it. […] There are times when you wonder desperately if humanity will ever become human again.”
Perhaps Kayzer himself was the gloomiest. In the VPRO Guide he called himself “much more pessimistic” than Steiner. “I am a realist. Sure, there have always been gigantic problems, only now they happen to be slightly bigger. We have now ruined the entire planet. We had never achieved that before.”
He said that in 1989. Thirty-four years later, in the year of his death, that ruin has become the talk of the day.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on June 2, 2023.