The TV as a theater of minor disruption

Serious? Serious. jiskefet never received the Silver Nipkow Disc. While you would expect that after the first episode of The pet storein which Michiel Romeyn a brown cardboard box with a ferret stumbling over the cords of their telephones (1992!) had called each other to immediately award the program. They didn’t.

Also the legendary That’s how it happens once again was skipped, in 1964. And that’s not even the best TV show that never got the Nipkow disc. That is it youth newswhich brings us to the self-criticism, because for the past five years I was on the jury myself and I didn’t think about it for a moment.

Fortunately, dozens of television makers have been awarded the prize, which celebrates their sixtieth anniversary this week with a reunion for former winners. Together, the acclaimed programs from days gone by provide a wonderful picture of what the Netherlands has been or would have liked to be over the years. In which the high and low culture could simply fall into each other’s arms between the chosen ones of the first Nipkow juries.

Fumbling with conventions

Take 1963, when the honor was shared by the eminent literary critic HA Gomperts with his Literary Encounters and the young entertainment king Rudi Carrell. Inhabitants of different planets, I thought – until I watched the broadcasts. I started with the interview that Gomperts had with Harry Mulisch. Gomperts introduced his guest, while his cigarette smoke was already swirling in the picture on the right. “I believe we should see in him not just a fashionable author, but a serious writer.” Mulisch didn’t flinch and started to display all the medals his Austrian father had earned in the First World War.

A little later, Gomperts asked what Mulisch’s rector meant when he accused him of being ‘an underground chatter’, hoping for a nice, war-related answer with different layers of meaning. Immediately the successful author let himself slide from his armchair, supple as a ballerina. Once on the studio floor with both buttocks on the studio floor, Mulisch explained that at school he often lowered himself out of his couch and then “passed under the couch” with a classmate to talk. Talking underground.

A similar theater of minor disruption appeared to take place on the stage of Rudi Carrell, the man who became famous among later generations for a skit in which he had women throw lingerie at the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini. Not everything on TV used to be better, but Rudi Carrell was. I saw an episode from 1963 from The Rudi Carrell Showin which 15-year-old Spanish singer and actress Marisol was a guest.

To her host’s disappointment, she spoke only Spanish. Fortunately, there was an interpreter in the room, Mr. Olona, ​​who could translate the words of the child star. “Unfortunately, he doesn’t speak Dutch, but luckily he does speak Arabic.” Sitting next to the Spaniard was “a real Arab”, who also spoke Russian, after which the list was supplemented with an Italian-speaking Russian and a Dutch-speaking Italian. Faithfully, the men passed on the words of the presenter and his guest to each other. The joke was that Marisol didn’t give a single answer of more than one word.

Carrell and Gomperts, each in their own way, showed how the Netherlands liked to make television: a neatly bourgeois setting in which conventions are gently tampered with, but in which order quickly returns. In the same way, the winner of the first Nipkow disk, art connoisseur Pierre Janssen, discussed a painting not only when it was hanging on the wall, but sometimes also while embracing it with two arms, as if he intended to raise the canvas. to eat.

world history

Television is not just for relaxation. Also ‘Ernstig Nederland’ was frequently put in the limelight by the early Nipkow juries. For example, there is a straight line from the phenomenal documentary series Culemborg for example to a contemporary series like Typical, although in 1975 there was considerably more confidence in the viewer’s patience – the haste has gripped TV in all segments this century. The minor disruptions still make it onto TV, but mostly pumped up to a ‘Great Drama’, accompanied by a voiceover that leaves nothing to guess.

While the image is nevertheless the great asset of the medium, with which we arrive at one of the most elegant awards – the greatest discovery for the viewer: Piet Kaart. When he received the Nipkow disc in 1967, it was the second award in three years for Focal pointthe current affairs program that had an eye like no other for what was happening far from our bed.

Map was not the anchor or the star reporter, however. He was the cameraman. He filmed from the bushes how American soldiers threw a smoke bomb into a shaky hut, because they suspected a fighter of the Viet Cong inside. Someone was indeed dragged out – miraculously still alive.

In 1961, Kaart filmed the construction of the Berlin Wall. He captured an older woman waving to the other side, where a younger woman and a little girl were waving back with their handkerchiefs. Map was equally attentive to the construction workers, who worked block by block to close off half a city without paying much attention to the quality of their masonry. And zoomed in on two soldiers, who looked at the new other side with a mixture of shame and suspicion. Unforgettable images, world history captured on Dutch TV.

Arjen Fortuin was a permanent TV critic until the beginning of 2022 NRC† In his recently published book Are you still watching? Why you should turn on the TV he looks back on five years of professional TV watching.