The country’s first local broadcaster woke up two villages

“The villages of Melick and Herkenbosch were deserted on Sunday afternoon between half past one and half past one,” it wrote. Limburgs Dagblad after the first broadcast of the first local broadcaster in the Netherlands, on February 17, 1974. In many living rooms, the community center and the sports hall, residents were “glued to the TV screen.” Immediately after the first broadcast, some people came to the studio to take a look.

That studio was a converted carpentry workshop in Melick. A bit of a struggle due to limited space. The ceiling was so low that the lamps could be hung standing on the floor. This also meant that it could get quite warm during broadcasts.

The big hit of the local broadcaster was not this weekly broadcast with news from the municipality, alternately prepared by four different production teams. In the highly political 1970s, that honor was reserved for the live broadcasts of council meetings. Els Breukers, who was responsible for the production in his early twenties: “While until then, only a handful of people had always sat in the public gallery. What helped was that we had some very good people in the political newsroom. They provided the necessary context with previews and afterthoughts. You hardly see that anymore at local broadcasters.”

Wil Haenen, one of the early cameramen as a teenager: “Cameras in council chambers nowadays switch on automatically when the buttons on certain microphones are pressed. That produces rather static, boring images.”

Small revolution

The presence of cameras in the council chamber caused a small revolution. “Until then, there were quite a few council members who only opened the envelope with the council documents sent to them during the meeting,” Breukers recalls. “They could no longer get away with that.” Haenen: “One of the local representatives fell asleep during the meeting. We took that fully into account. A while later he declined further council work.”

The great pioneer of local TV in Melick-Herkenbosch, mayor Frans Feij, had been thinking about the idea for some time. Local democracy could use a boost. As early as 1971, the year he switched from the KVP to the VVD, the forty-something took the initiative for broadcasts via the brand new cable network. The director saw great possibilities in the medium of television.

But the experiment in Central Limburg was not to the liking of politicians in The Hague. There, everything related to broadcasting was sensitive and people preferred to shape policy in that area themselves. The Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work (CRM) forced Feij to stop the trial.

The prematurely terminated experiment ensured that Melick-Herkenbosch was ready when CRM started an official trial with local broadcasters three years later, in 1974. The Central Limburg municipality got the scoop. Five other places followed shortly afterwards.

Severe criticism

The new broadcaster received help from the Hasebos brothers to teach Limburgers the profession of television making. They came from Hilversum to Melick-Herkenbosch. Martijn Hasebos, who even came to live there, taught the volunteers the ins and outs of the technical field. Ton Hasebos supervised the content during the weekends. He had almost fifteen years of experience in the broadcasting world and had made a name for himself with the VPRO children’s program Gnome Candlestickwhere he provided the lyrics, music and direction.

As soon as a broadcast was over, Ton Hasebos sat down with everyone and asked for an opinion. “If we thought we had made something beautiful, he disputed it: ‘What do you mean?’,” Haenen remembers. “Then he came with criticism. Very directly, as he was used to at the VPRO, planks are really cut from thick wood.”

Breukers: “Evaluations regularly took longer than the broadcast itself. Sometimes he didn’t give us a damn and we didn’t like that. But when he stopped coming after a few years, we realized that he had often been right and we continued to discuss things according to his method.” Haenen: “Ton stung and made you think. That was educational. And he could also be very stimulating. If someone had an idea, he said, ‘Work it out.’”

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More than 150 volunteers

There was no shortage of volunteers. “In the early years we had more than 150,” says Breukers. A large number, considering the six hundred households that were initially able to watch the broadcasts at home. “But with the expansion of the cable network, that number grew rapidly.”

Breukers, active in broadcasting together with her husband, would stay for thirty years. “In all that time I never had a weekend. It involved working towards a programme, sometimes even during the night from Saturday to Sunday: broadcast, evaluation and clean-up. If we had had children, we would never have been able to afford it. We still had full-time jobs on the side.”

Haenen didn’t need a gym. “We had to carry around a lot of heavy equipment from back then. For council meetings, everything had to go to the town hall and then back again. During on-location interviews, you brought everything into people’s homes and equipment had to warm up for an hour. But everything was new and interviewees had the patience for that at the time.”

Over time, the journalistic power and possibilities grew. Breukers: “After the major earthquake in Central Limburg in 1992, everyone immediately went out and we had a nice broadcast at seven o’clock in the evening.” Haenen: “During the flood a year later, we even made a provincial broadcast, thanks to thirteen beam transmitters, all at different locations. The regional broadcaster did not yet do TV. It won’t work, many thought. But we got it done.”

On to Hilversum

The necessary employees of the local broadcaster Melick-Herkenbosch later turned their hobby into their profession. They moved on to the regional broadcaster or to Hilversum. Haenen still works as a cameraman. “Sometimes also during live communications with the police station in Maastricht Investigation requested. Then you will get the director or presenter Anniko van Santen on the phone from Hilversum. They both also started in Melick-Herkenbosch. Those are special moments.”

In the meantime, the old tapes of the first local broadcaster in the Netherlands are located in the basement and attic of Breukers. “Because they had no place for their own archives. I have now contacted Sound & Vision in Hilversum. They would like to have the tires there. Now I have the current board (now local broadcaster OR6, ed.) requested permission for that move. I’ve been waiting for that for almost a month.”

Breukers shows understanding: “Volunteers are harder to get these days. And who under seventy is still watching? It is time for new forms.”

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