Help, my husband is a handyman has been presented by John Williams since 2005. The eighteenth season of this cult program started on Monday evening in Bergeijk in Brabant, where we met the tough Stevie, man of Moniek who had written to Williams in a panic. The family lives in a container in the garden, because their house is still uninhabitable. Unfortunately, the money is gone and the permit is almost.
It soon became clear why doing odd jobs lasts for so long: Stevie is strongly inclined to carry things from hot to reinforcement. That of course does not help. Professional handyman Jojanneke saw the head shaking and stevie in kind but strict: “You don’t have to move things all the time. Otherwise you are only busy moving. Neat and clean work, that helps.”
Are busy moving without putting the dike. In Kakelcracy the Netherlands we are good at it, especially when it comes to opinions of ‘clares’. That’s how Raymond Mens attended Sunday The Oranjezondagand Monday at News of the day (SBS6) and not much later Pauw & De Wit (NPO1). In 24 hours, the right -wing man had to have it three times about punk duo Bob Vylan. And he was not the only one, although the right -wing opinion was.
The dry -comic but intellect Van Roosmalen & Groenteman (NPO 3), with a left-wing politician (Jesse Klaver), was the only talk show where the same Bob Vylan images did not appear endlessly. In the other five talk shows. There was hardly any difference between the tables, except that at News of the day Caroline van der Plas and Bram Moskowicz rushed that the musicians had to leave the country. That while the judge had ruled in summary proceedings that no criminal offenses had been committed. Furthermore, the tables agreed, from right to even more right, and yet the texts of one rapper filled all evening.
Eva (NPO 1) paid a lot of attention to ‘the new hope in frightened days’ Joost Eerdmans, and stretched the Vylan theme forced to the umpteenth discussion about a divided society. The question is whether the Netherlands is really so divided, or whether the so -called ‘Overtton Window’ has simply moved to the right: the spectrum of ideas that we consider acceptable in the debate. For example, the murdered extremely conservative Charlie Kirk thought that Martin Luther King was a bad person and the Civil Rights Act is a mistake. That would have been quite extreme not so long ago, now Kirk is being chased by the right -wing man for the guardian of freedom of expression.
Feasible
Of course geopolitical problems is too abstract to discuss proper talk show tables. You need other means for that, such as the NPO DOC Made in Ethiopia (NPO 2). For four years the viewer is taken to Dukem, a small town in Ethiopia. There, Chinese investors, farmers and factory workers clash over land, work and future. The documentary by Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan follows three women who are each imprisoned in their own way in the desire for a better future. Motto, deputy director of the Industriepark, has left China and her daughter and wants to expand the industrial park, but encounters farmers who do not want to lose their country. Worker Beti is full of jeans but actually wants to become a designer, and farmer’s workinesh is waiting in vain for promised agricultural land to compensate. When the Coronacrisis and the civil war break out almost simultaneously, the huge industrial park threatens to go bankrupt. But only in the wildly interesting and layered stories of the three women, that abstract geopolitric becomes concrete, tangible. Certainly with a fascinating but complicated theme such as neo -colonialism, narrative journalism is indispensable.
Unfortunately, the rest of this Monday evening was reminiscent of what the American linguist Noam Chomsky has been translated freely into his book The Common Good (1998) writes: “The smartest way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinions, but to allow very lively discussions within that spectrum.” On a pole for the disputed pop venue Paradiso is a poster with the text: Artists are not the story. Gaza is the Story.