The day before his fiftieth birthday, Gijs Groenteman gets his own program on television. Greengrocer on Sunday. Sunday evening at half past eight at NPO 3, live talk about music, books and theater. What does it remind you of? At The plantationthe cultural program that his mother Hanneke Groenteman presented for seven years, also live and on Sunday afternoon.
Wasn’t it a great idea, I texted the son, to meet up with his mother? Could they talk together about their love for interviewing, watching, listening and, who knows, about their love for each other? She raised him alone. In the weekly podcast that Gijs Groenteman makes with Teun van de Keuken, a friend from the Barlaeus Gymnasium in Amsterdam, she always calls in to catch up. Listeners love that.
Gijs Groenteman answers that he is very close to his mother, but that an interview together, a written interview still makes him uncomfortable in advance.
He will explain this later. “My mother is either going to praise me or be very critical of me. And I find both unpleasant.” I was allowed to call her in advance.
She was the last person to know, she says on the phone, that he was getting his own program. “Finally”, because there was a time when he felt, and was, misunderstood. He is the best interviewer she knows, much better than she was. “He is intuitive and intelligent.” She doesn’t say it as a proud mother. “I understand it. Really, believe me.” She is also not afraid to point out some flaws. The glass of gin and tonic and that enormous mug of tea that are always on the table in front of him during the TV program he makes with Marcel van Roosmalen – it was first called Media Insidenow Van Roosmalen&Groenteman. And that inhaler next to it – Gijs has asthma and is afraid he will have a coughing fit. “Awesome,” she thinks. Oh, and the stylists give them stupid clothes.
Furthermore, she must of course be careful what she says as a mother. Sometimes he reacts “hypersensitive”, which he considers a “perfectly reasonable” reaction. They once had a terrible fight over her comments about him in public. “Never again. That’s killing me.”
On Sunday afternoon in a restaurant in Amsterdam East, it is Gijs Groenteman who starts asking questions. After a minute or so I’m allowed.
What are you going to do on Sunday night?”
“Yes, you know, the thing is, usually I don’t know what exactly I’m making until after a few episodes. We have prepared a few things. I’m interviewing someone who has something – a play, a concert, a show. Then I talk to two people who have been to two performances. Donnie and Corry Konings had a song together last summer and then they go to an opera and something else and review it. Froukje is a guest to talk about her record and we have another section Teenage kicksin which someone talks about his first single.”
On Mondays you are also on TV with Marcel van Roosmalen. You have your daily podcast with Marcel, every week with Teun, two podcasts for de Volkskrant. Quite a lot, huh?
It’s a lot, but I love having to keep laying that egg. That I can make fun of people in both interviews and podcasts. I have been in the theater, I am making a TV program, another one soon. I really think that I can do that every day… Not that I don’t go to work feeling sad and shaky, but on a meta level I like it.”
You always dread it?
“Always. I have to again. And afterwards I still like it. Such is my nature. Working is an effective way to keep depression at bay. I don’t think I’m really depressed, but I’m no stranger to a serious form of despondency.”
You’ve had success, your stove smokes nicely. Does that surprise you?
If you had told me ten years ago that things would turn out this way, I would have been surprised. I’ve been struggling for years and always felt like I was lagging behind. I find it a sensation that I have created something from the ground up with those podcasts, that I have a profitable business with Teun and our partner Guusje de Vries. And it could all be over next year, right? We could get into a fight, or the listeners would be done with us.”
Are you afraid of what people think of you? In your podcasts they hear all kinds of things about you, your family and what you think.
Well no. What I reveal about my personal life is a kind of columnist reality. I have been with Aaf for a long time [Brandt Corstius] and she does the same in her columns. It’s about our lives, and then again it’s not. Look, you can sell out yourself, but you have to save others. Do talk about your own discomfort, clumsiness or inability, not about your children’s arguments or loves.” Groenteman is the father of Olivia and Kobus, 23-year-old twins from a previous marriage. With Aaf he has Rifka (13) and Benjamin (14).
Aaf’s father was a well-known columnist, your mother a radio and TV celebrity. Does that make you extra alert to what you do and do not share?
“I have forbidden my mother to ever talk about me in interviews again. A bit of posturing on my part, she never says very personal things. Yes, that interview with Ischa. That was a very unpleasant interview.”
Ischa Meijer leaves in one Free Netherlands-interview from 1984 Hanneke Groenteman talks about her son, Gijs is 10. She calls their relationship symbiotic, and Gijs her “dream friend”.
You found that interview…
“Far too intimate. I remember when he was at our house and my mother wanted to get things out. He refused. It’s a written interview, so it stays. It has been included in at least three books, people just grab it off the shelf.” In the interview collection Ischa from 2005 that Groenteman made, he also talks about it himself. In the introduction.
Could you do such an interview, like Ischa did with your mother?
“Ischa was a harsh interviewer, I was not. If someone allows me to go into such detail about a relationship, I can’t imagine it happening, then I could.”
Do you want to become or be an Ischa?
“What is an Ischa?”
Legendary interviewer?
What I like about Ischa, about all the people I admire, is that he did so many different things. Everything was his playground. I’m glad I managed to get into that position.”
In With Groenteman in the cupboard This month he interviewed writer Connie Palmen, who complained about the biography of her deceased lover Ischa Meijer. She didn’t like that biography, and not just because she barely featured in it. She felt that the biographer, Annet Mooij, as a lesbian woman, did not understand heterosexual lust and therefore could not write about Ischa and his many mistresses.
Groenteman was criticized by Jolande Withuis, also a biographer, who felt that he had laid out “a red carpet” for Palmen’s “hate campaign”. He should not have allowed her “sexism” to go unchallenged.
Does that criticism affect you?
“In retrospect, I think there should have been something more present in the interview. Like, ‘Are you really serious?’ or ‘Is this really that prudent?’”
Do you dare to argue?
“Don’t argue. I do have a fierce side.”
A sucking side?
“I have difficulty interpreting my own presence. I seem to have quite a dominant and moody appearance.”
Do you think people are afraid of you?
“Sure.”
Is it possible to seriously interview people and laugh at them with Marcel in your podcast?
“The empathetic and the sardonic are two sides that very much belong to me.”
Lotte Houwink ten Cate, a PhD historian, wrote in an opinion piece NRC that Greengrocer put her in Another day had called a “horny student.” Subtle but toxic “homegrown sexism,” she thought, from men who present themselves as “left-wing underdogs” and not as the media entrepreneurs they are.
She thinks you’re a sexist.
“If you write out our texts in black and white, it will come across as very clumsy. I didn’t mean to say she was a hot chick, I just called her that because she was a young woman talking about sex in a radio interview.”
She feels insulted.
“She has that right. I don’t think it’s such a serious issue.”
Does the offended or the insulter decide whether something is bad?
“No doubt what I said came across as sexist. But it is said in an atmosphere and in a way that completely suits me, suits us. It is a form of humor that I certainly find within limits, she will think I am sexist, I don’t.”
He asks: do you think she has a point? And then says that he had a “spirited discussion” about it with his older children during Christmas dinner. His 23-year-old son and daughter found Lotte Houwink ten Cate’s criticism “far from incomprehensible”.
Do you learn something from your children, the new generation?
“I’m quite inflexible. I learn less from it than perhaps I should.”
He says: “Interesting to suddenly be in Johan Derksen’s corner.”
Interesting or annoying?
“Interesting.”
You and Marcel are a generation younger than Johan Derksen.
“We are also just old. Old white men.”
They apparently get plenty of opportunities in public broadcasting.
“At BNNVARA, of all places. We already score well for NPO 3 concepts and also in the target group. My belief is that young people like disruptive people. A little bit of rebellion.”
Will you have to be more careful in Groenteman on Sunday?
“A podcast is a living room where people come in especially for you. People who don’t know me are zapping past on TV, so you have to be more careful about what you say and do. It’s quite something if you don’t follow a strict format, but just let everything happen. That is an anarchy that you hardly see anywhere anymore.”
Do you care what your mother will think?
“She is usually very enthusiastic, she is my biggest fan. But in this case, with this program, I imagine her opinion will be a little sharper. I can’t handle criticism well, so that could get grim.”
She thinks you are better than she thought of herself.
“I also think I’m better as an interviewer. But she again has a huge personality that is difficult to top. That is a talent that cannot be learned.”
In a recent podcast you tell her, “Don’t die just yet, Mom.” Are you afraid of that?
“I’m curious about what that’s like. How am I going to respond then? Am I completely silent? Will I continue to function?
Ischa would now say that you work so hard to please your mother.
“That’s why I’m so curious about it.”