Around the turn of the century, at the last moment, Hans Goedkoop cancels a screen test for presenting the history program Other times† The editor-in-chief and co-creator of it jumps in the car and drives to Amsterdam to persuade him after all.
Ad van Liempt looks back: ‘I think he was exactly the ideal history teacher we were looking for.’ Van Liempt has already seen Goedkoop (now 59) on TV a few times.
Around the same time, Goedkoop prescribes book reviews NRC Handelsblad† Punctual pieces, says Hubert Smeets of that newspaper. But Goedkoop has more to offer, he thinks. Carrying essays of roughly 2,500 words with a connection between literature and current events.
Now Smeets says: ‘It took a lot of drinks, at my house, to convince Hans that he could do it.’
What do we learn from this? History can just take a different course, because of whether or not people and time intersect.
doubter
Hans Goedkoop – who graduated cum laude in 1996 as a historian on the biography of Herman Heijermans – knows this better than anyone.
Tonight he can give the May 4 lecture in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk. The penultimate was pronounced by Arnon Grunberg.
Leave Cheap now as NRCreviewer wrote a damning piece about Grunberg’s novel extras. So negative tone (nothing personal, the successor Phantom pain was praised) that Grunberg threatened never again NRC to write. It can get weird with that history.
Hans Goedkoop – best known to the general public as a TV show host Other times – immediately says ‘yes’ when he is approached in December last year to give the May 4 lecture in the Nieuwe Kerk. He considers that ‘honourable’.
But he is not always so determined. Goedkoop, who was born in Ermelo, has something of a doubter, if only because of his pursuit of perfection and keeping a grip on everything. As a student, he has no clear-cut plans about how and what. Until Rena Fuks-Mansveld, the professor of Jewish history who died in 2012, inspires him to go in the direction of history.
Current history
What his lecture is about tonight is a secret. For an audience of now 1,600 people, it is by convention about something related to the Second World War.
Goedkoop had to submit his text to the National Committee for 4 and 5 May within two months. A short span of time. When he started to think about this alone, and started to read up on it, he discovered that very current history was hardly ever discussed in previous lectures. It is as if time stands still between January and May.
But there is always history somewhere, history knows no pause, Goedkoop knows. He has, many say, a great talent for making history ‘alive’. Unmistakable talents as a recital artist, someone with a fluent pen moreover. ‘What can the ideal history teacher do?’ Ad van Liempt asks himself. The answer: ‘That you can tell a story very credibly and that the public has the idea that you know much, much more.’
For the TV history program they worked on, things went something like this in the past. The history began in roughly 1898 (moving images were simply needed) and Goedkoop was fed by the editors with facts about the subject. From the history of the Dolle Mina’s to the origin of traffic jams.
Van Liempt: ‘As a presenter he always wrote his own texts based on that information. Brilliant, very precise, fascinating to listen to. If you also have a voice like that…’
Goedkoop wrote standard works about Herman Heijermans and Renate Rubinstein. As a literary critic he measured the work of others according to his own recognizable yardstick. He also described his family history: the actions and thoughts of his grandfather, KNIL General Van Langen, during the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies. He has been speaking to halls of Indian people for a long time. ‘They expect a pleasant afternoon, with gingerbread, and then I’ll come.’
Jubilant portrait
There are simply stories that need to be told, says Hans Goedkoop. Especially less pleasant. Presenting such a story is one thing, making it yourself and figuring it out is another. Goedkoop has also earned his spurs as a documentary maker with series of programs about, among other things, the Eighty Years’ War and the Golden Age.
On these programs he worked together with Marja Ros, editor-in-chief of the history department of the NTR. She emphasizes that Goedkoop feels hyper-responsible for everything he does or participates in. He also thinks along with everything.
Also for this Final Agreement. Ros has been advised by Goedkoop to highlight negative qualifications. Otherwise it would be such a jubilant portrait. And? Nothing comes to mind. Ros is silent.
All the thinking and writing work has been based on Monnickendam for several years now. Hans Goedkoop and his husband and artist Arnoud Holleman exchanged Amsterdam for a quieter environment. They live there with a ‘walk-in cat’ who was initially called Corona and is now called Poes.
Cheap: ‘It was a bit crazy to keep shouting: Corona! Corona!’ And unlike Cheap is used to: no response. The cat didn’t listen. Like cats never listen to a name. Just like some people, contemporary history teaches us not to want to hear anything about corona.
3 x Hans Cheap
He would make a large series (nine episodes) for television about the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies. But corona made the project more difficult. The Indian bill has become a diptych.
Cheap presented from 2000 to 2019 Other times (NTR, VPRO). That history program was awarded the Silver Nipkow Disc in the second year.
He is also the creator and executor of the theater lecture “Death must you”. This deals with threats, for example via social media, that have increased in number during the corona crisis. The title refers to the pronunciation of Obuma’s wife in jiskefet: ‘Dead! You must die!’