Eva Jinek gets quite frustrated when the guests at her talk show table don’t say exactly the same as during the preliminary conversation with the editors. “It’s a disaster if they don’t deliver!”
Tonight it’s that time again: Eva Jinek returns with her daily talk show on RTL 4. She is currently talking in every interview about what kind of top sport her program is. Why? Well, because then she’s in a kind of hyper-concentration, noticing every expression and every movement of her guests. “I won’t hear a cough from the audience anymore!”
Disaster for Eva
Well, applause for Eva. But is it all really that impressive? She reveals in the podcast Experience For Beginners from presenter Theo Maassen that during her interviews in ‘Jinek’ she is mainly busy reproducing preliminary conversations. “They are conversations in a very constructed form.”
“A disaster for a talk show host is a guy who has a great pre-talk, which you really just adore, because my editors write everything out. That you think: oh, this is beautiful, this is great, I want all these details! And that at the table for whatever reason – embarrassment, nerves, I don’t know – they don’t deliver, as they call it.”
easy going
Eva gets pretty frustrated when her guests don’t just tell them what they’ve said in the preliminary conversation. “You know all those things, you’ve read them all, you could spoon it all up, but you can’t.”
Theo: “And you also want to give a bit of an elegant cross. It’s also very ugly to…”
Eva: “Yes, from: I’m going to tell you how you felt when that happened.”
Theo: “Or: ‘Tell me about that squirrel again!’”
take a loss
Eva agrees: “That! That’s so awful. So I don’t do that either and that means you have to take your loss. I try two or three different ways to fly it and sometimes it just doesn’t happen. If that happens to you in the beginning, you can have a kind of talk show panic, like: how am I going to get out of this and how am I going to make it right?”
Now Eva has less of that panic feeling. “There’s a certain resignation to that now that comes with the experience, of, okay, this is what’s happening now, I’ll take my loss, I’m not going to get hung up on it and I’m going to keep going. That really comes with time, but it does raise the level.”
“Is that nice?”
Theo wonders why Eva clings so obsessively to preliminary conversations: “Is that nice? I sometimes have conversations at such a table and I find those preliminary conversations dull. I don’t feel like telling the same story twice. Is that necessary, Eva?”
Eva: “I would say: I wouldn’t do that with a guest like you, no. I have the best talk show editors in the Netherlands by far and they do nothing but try to prepare everything, be ahead of everything, because there are so many uncertain factors. They come with me with the thickest possible package with everything in it, with fantastic preliminary conversations and then they say: ‘Eef, this is it.’”
Constructed
That’s great, says Eva. She apparently doesn’t mind that it takes all the spontaneity out of the conversation. It’s all very well constructed anyway, she continues. “These are conversations in a very constructed form. A conversation between two people who know each other at a bus stop is completely different from what we make at the table.”
“I would almost describe it as performance art. It’s prepared, we know who you are, why you’re invited. It’s almost a dance. When I say play or drama, I think it’s too fake. It’s not, but it’s constructed. It’s also in a time frame: twelve minutes for that, eighteen for that. I have an internal alarm clock that knows approximately when it should be over.”
Ah, Eva thinks a talk show presents not only top sport, but also performance art. Time for someone to put her feet on the ground again.