Long before Jinek, Matthijs, Pauw or Witteman, Sonja Barend presented a talk show in which she mixed entertainment and serious matters for a wide audience. In her legendary TV show Sonja’s Good News Showlater renamed Sonja on Mondaythere was always something to do. From 1977 to 1996 she hosted a progressive, controversial talk show where the next day’s conversation was held. No matter how high the emotions ran in the studio, the presenter always concluded with the wish: “And for later: sleep well and wake up healthy tomorrow.”
Sonja Barend, an authoritative television maker for forty years, died on Saturday at the age of 86. She is survived by her husband, architect Abel Cahen, and his three daughters. Barend and Cahen were together for more than forty years.
In her talk shows, Barend let ordinary people have their say and broke taboos by, for example, inviting people from marginalized groups: gays, guest workers, addicted sex workers, pedophiles, ex-convicts, trans women, BOM mothers, anorexia and AIDS patients. The program was about abortion, euthanasia, women’s rights. “A tub full of misery,” he said The Telegraph – the right-wing newspaper was not a fan of the show. Barend and her permanent editor Ellen Blazer showed a good feeling for what was going on in society. In 2011, Barend himself concluded: “Our ideal was that you talk about things that people find important and that we find important and that you can find a large audience for that. We succeeded.”
‘There isn’t a day that I don’t think about my father’
Born on Leap Day 1940 (February 29) to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, her life was defined by the Second World War. When she was two years old, two “neatly dressed Dutchmen” came to pick up her father. He put his wallet in the table lamp and said to her mother: “You will never see me again.” The sorter of second-hand jute bags died in early 1943 in the Auschwitz extermination camp. Barend’s mother started a new family soon afterwards. The two-year-old toddler was kept with her grandparents in Alkmaar until she was seven. She didn’t know any better or she was the Catholic girl ‘Sonja de Groot’. When she was ten, she saw ‘Sonja Barend’ on the birthday calendar in her aunt’s toilet. “That’s a coincidence,” she said to her aunt. “There is another Sonja whose birthday is on February 29.” “That’s you,” her aunt replied.
Why hadn’t mother told the men who came to get him that her husband wasn’t home? Who had reported her father? Why had her mother become pregnant and remarried so soon after his deportation?
Only then was she told that her stepfather was not her father. That her biological father was Jewish and that he had been murdered by the Nazis. From that moment on, May 4 became her ‘Father’s Day’. In her memoirs You’ll never see me again (2019), Barend says that as an interviewer she asked everyone all the impertinent questions, but that to her great regret she never dared to ask her mother what really happened with her father’s death. Why hadn’t mother told the men who came to get him that her husband wasn’t home? Who had reported her father? Why had her mother become pregnant and remarried so soon after his deportation? In one NRC-interview, Barend said at the time: “There is not a day that I do not think about my father. I always see him standing in front of the open door of the hallway on the second floor where we lived. Hat on, raincoat on, shiny polished shoes. Always the same image. As if I knew him and have stored that last image very clearly in my head. But I was two years old and I was sleeping.”
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Sonja Barend’s father was taken away when she was two years old. She knows little about the circumstances. “When I asked about it, my mother said: ‘Oh child, I don’t remember that’.”
She didn’t get along well with her stepfather. “When I earn my own money later, I will pay for a divorce for Mom,” she said as a child. Girls did not have to continue their education, her stepfather thought, so to her sadness Barend had to go to secondary education – comparable to the current pre-vocational secondary education. At the age of fifteen she started working at the Twentsche Bank. She counted up bank transfer slips with a counting machine. According to her memoirs, the bank ruled: “She is an intelligent girl from a very decent background. She is a bit of a chatterbox.” After work she attended evening secondary school and then studied to become a career counselor.
On television
In 1966 she was able to work as a script girl at the NTS, the predecessor of the NOS. Her first time on television was born out of necessity. In 1967, broadcaster NTS could not find suitable announcers – young ladies who announced the programmes. That’s why ‘Ms. Sonja Barend’ deployed. She stood out because of her large earrings. She had to put her long red hair up, otherwise it would look ‘whorish’.
The NTS could not retain Barend as an announcer: she soon left for VARA to present youth programmes, as Young Researchers and Yin and Yang. In the editorial staff of the latter program she met Ralph Inbar, whom she married, and the comedy duo Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie. Yin and Yang was to be a “hip and spicy” program, featuring a striptease artist and a transvestite, and “boys dancing with each other in a box for underage homosexuals.” But after two weeks, Barend and the others had an argument with the director and the program disappeared from TV again. After this she presented a whole bouquet of programs: the teenage program Fen clubthe successor Dot… Dot… Dotculture magazine From Bellevueand the senior citizen program A day older. The Newspaper of the North recognized her qualities early on: “Sonja Barend can now call herself the Gnome Handjehelp of Dutch television: blitz with the blitzers and kind to the elderly.”
In 1969, Barend emigrated to Israel, where her husband Ralph Inbar worked for the newly established public broadcaster. Barend presented several TV programs in Hebrew on Israeli television, but she became homesick and quickly returned. After this she presented various entertainment programs for the Avro. In 1974 she got her own talk show: Sonja’s evening.
Society demanded commotion
Her big break came in November 8, 1977, when she had returned to VARA. Sonja’s Good News Show was to be a ‘light, warm and entertaining’ program in which ordinary people came to tell their good news of that week. Man rescued from the canal, return of missing cat, that kind of thing. Not much came of it: society demanded commotion. The time had already come during the second broadcast. An item about swearing ended with a song in which comedian Rob van de Meeberg had incorporated as many heavy curses as possible. The viewers responded with angry letters and cancellations and parliamentary questions were asked.
And so it stayed. The good news from ordinary people was quickly replaced by exciting issues and sensational guests. “There was a lot of laughter,” Blazer said in 2006, “and noise in the cabin, because we wanted a big audience.” A guest with Tourette’s syndrome was advised in advance by the editors not to take his medication, so that his compulsive swearing (“Pokke! Pokke! Kuh-hut!”) would resound through the room. To the anger of the Public Prosecution Service, Barend interviewed fugitive bank robber Stanley Hillis after he escaped from prison. Feminists smeared a porn coupon with paint and railed against Maarten ‘t Hart because of his book The woman does not exist. Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven got a glass of wine in the face because he was with his film Splashes would fuel homophobia. Barend was not exactly a detached, neutral discussion leader in her program. No, she participated nicely. If she, with the audience always on her hand, turned against a guest, the broadcast could end in a people’s court.
Barend’s talk show divided the nation. There were millions of Sonja fans who enjoyed her sparkling presentation, in which she candidly expressed her own pleasure, preferences, opinions and dislikes. But there were also Sonja haters who made mincemeat of her in the newspaper columns because they disagreed with her progressive opinions – such as The Telegraph – or because they looked down on television for a broad audience – like Jan Blokker and other left-wing intellectuals. Barend was a neatly and fashionably dressed lady with a crooked smile in which some read aloofness, even arrogance. She was also one of the few women on TV with a strong opinion. A number of men seemed to have difficulty coping with this. Artist Karel Appel, a guest in the show in 1982, said to her in exasperation in French: “Shut your mouth and beautiful creature!”
From now on a helpful discussion leader
Her talk show stopped in 1996. A year later she started the talk show with Paul Witteman B&Wwhich is much more similar to today’s talk shows. So no more verbal fights in the middle of a noisy audience. From then on, Barend acted as a discussion leader and interviewer, and kept her own opinions to herself. In 2006 she made her last program: a series about the legacy of half a century of television in the Netherlands. The Sonja Barend Award has been presented annually since 2009, a professional prize for the best TV interview.
Barend was down-to-earth about the effect of her own television work. “I remain proud to have spearheaded a program that increased empowerment,” she said. De Volkskrant. And against The Morning: “I also thought for a long time that we did not have such a significant influence with our program. Then I came home in the evening and said: ‘Well, we made the air vibrate for another hour.’ That’s all it was, I thought. But now I am convinced that we have moved a few grains of sand.”
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Sonja Barend was, Eva Jinek is a talk show host. For an evening they talk about fame, children and the capriciousness of the profession. “People cannot be tamed. Sometimes you have to accept the loss.”
