Television series and a daily review column do not make for a happy marriage; the meeting always comes too early or too late. Either a series has barely started (and what do you write about?) or you describe what everyone has seen or has forgotten weeks before. It becomes even more difficult with an excellently acted, but difficult to place series like The Terrible Eighties† In the early episodes, I wondered if I was watching a comedy series, a children’s series, or a drama series. Absurdism, language virtuosity, sentiment, VPRO children with long hair nostalgia, slapstick, residential group clichés – everything is there, until just over the top†
What I didn’t expect was that while looking ahead (everything Gets up NPO Plus) of the last episodes would continuously have a lump in my throat.
So now a piece, before you miss it all. Sunday was the third episode, which contain foreshadowings of the great drama. We write May 2, 1986, when the aggressive-narcissistic community leader Bert (Jacob Derwig) forces three of his four wives and the accompanying crowd of children to go for a walk, during which he, in full conviction of his leadership, shouts the group in the wrong direction again and again.
It leads to an escalation in which the nine-year-old girl Piet (Rosa van Leeuwen), whose conversations with the Kindertelefoon are interwoven throughout the scenes, is pushed into the nettles by another child. Bert knows what to do: “I’ll piss over it.” He thinks he can counter the first female dismay (his thing is already dangling from his fly) with a practical: “I can aim, you can’t!” The wisest of the women, Joyce played by Malou Gorter, tells him: “Kids are not something to piss on, motherfucker. Children are to… to take care of.” This touches Bert; something becomes visible of a great sadness that Joyce says needs to be named. Bert, in response, orders the group to be silent for 32 hours.
hall closet
The next day, Piet gets into a fight at school with a classmate who has seen the roadside scene and taunts her with her dependence on Donnie, the community boy whom Piet almost always knows by her side. When everyone sees Frizzle Sizzle at the Eurovision Song Contest that evening against Sandra Kim, Piet crawls into Donnie’s hall closet and says that he was the reason for the fight: “It’s always about you.”
Bert is the main eye-catcher of the series. He is the only member of the group demanding the right to “fuck outside the door”, struggles like a Kees van Kooten character on a pharmacy counter when the Chernobyl panic strikes and is obsessed with participating in On land, at sea and in the air† The big cover is in the fifth episode, when it becomes clear how terrible the terrible is. Two episodes later, the highlight of the entire series follows: a monumental tragic monologue by Derwig in a conversation with a youth care employee.
In that part of the series you are irreparably moved by the simple sentences that screenwriter Kim van Kooten has put in the mouth of young Piet. ‘s script The Terrible Eighties is a tour de force, in which, between the madness and tear-jerking, a Revecitaat is just thrown in and you have to realize that for all grown-ups it is better to cook soup with it. There is actually only one normal adult in the series, a minor character played by Kim van Kooten.
In all this Piet has to find her way, a lonely child who in a sad moment says softly: “I belong to everyone.”