Yvonne Coldeweijer thinks that Jort Kelder really fell through the basket because of the revelation that he has learned his cocky accent. “That’s actually just fake.”
It is something that Jort Kelder prefers not to be confronted with: his ordinary origins. He is actually not a cockerel or someone of nobility at all, but he has learned that style and the accent. It already resulted in a very uncomfortable radio interview and in the spring he also became pissed off when Art Rooijakkers asked him about it on TV.
George’s fake accent
Yvonne Coldeweijer therefore doubts Jort’s authenticity, says the juice queen in her podcast The Juice Show. “Jort Kelder talks very posh all those years and is a star of nobility and then you suddenly hear in an interview with the media that that accent is fake.”
According to Jaap Kooijman, senior lecturer in Media Studies at the UvA, this does not necessarily mean that Jort is not authentic. “Authenticity is not inherent in a media appearance, but is something we appropriate to it. So if we experience everyone as real, then such a person becomes real. That is independent of whether they are actually real.”
‘falls through the basket’
So it really doesn’t matter what accent Jort spoke with at home when he was growing up, says Jaap. “If he is perceived as authentic, then he is authentic.”
Yvonne: “But doesn’t it matter when it comes out?”
Co-host Mark Koster: “He finds it annoying himself, because Jort, you can ask him anything, but he found this annoying.”
Yvonne: “He falls through the basket, I would say.”
George as a phenomenon
Mark surprised: “You say: ‘What difference does it make?’ But why does he fight so that he still wants to keep it up?”
Jaap: “Well, and then you come to the personal motivation: I don’t know. You have to ask Jort Kelder that and as a scientist I can’t interpret that either. Look, they are of course people of flesh and blood, but I do not study them as human beings. I study them as a cultural phenomenon. As something that plays in the media landscape.”