I wanted to see the whole scene of Frans Bauer in the garden center. It would feel good, I thought, to see him walking along long rows of pine trees with Mariska and their unreasonably large number of sons, arguing about how many yards of Christmas lights you can buy before the fun really goes away.
Bee Eva! (AVROTROS) there was already an extensive preview of those garden center adventures on Tuesday. Frans, Mariska and Christiaan, the youngest Bauer member, were guests there because of their reality series Christmas with the Bauers (AVROTROS) would start later that evening. “He looks traumatized!” Eva Jinek shouted after a fragment in which Frans trudged behind his wife with hollow eyes while she loaded boxes full of white gold lights into a cart. Mariska smiled broadly when she saw those images. In the bar below her name, usually reserved for titles and professions, four words kept appearing: looking forward to Christmas. Great, I thought from the couch. Bring on those Bauers.
But it still took quite a while until the broadcast started, and something strange was going on that Tuesday. An uncertain feeling had come over me during a tour of the available talk shows. It started with Good morning Netherlands (WNL): the latest updates on the budget negotiations and the explosions in The Hague were interspersed with hippo photos. As usual, the guests each brought their own expertise and interests. EWeditor-in-chief Hella Hueck called for resistance against “the stigmatizing term ‘slum landlord’”. Presenter Floris Göbel advised viewers against adopting a pelican. Former party leader of the VVD in the Senate Annemarie Jorritsma wanted to go on a beaver safari.
Then there was Unheard of in the Netherlands (ON), where the panel predicted that chaos would break out in Syria after the fall of Assad, but also extensively discussed the question of when Syrian refugees would finally return to Syria. When the contradiction was complete, presenter Tom de Nooijer turned to the camera to smoothly transition to the next item. “Now a problem that they don’t have in Syria,” said De Nooijer, “woke.”
Cleaning book
Then Time for Max (MAX), which started with Kees Boonman’s explanation of The Hague politics and ended with the new cleaning book by Estelle Cruijff (four words appeared under her name: cleaning makes you happy). The cleaning item ended in a minutes-long series of anecdotes from both Cruijff and presenters Sybrand Niessen and Martine van Os, who took turns talking about their experiments with different cleaning products. “Now that we are working on the series of strange stories: when I gave birth, I had to sit in the Biotex,” said Van Os. When Niessen explained that it is best to throw your dirty dishcloths in the microwave, Boonman started laughing so hard that his eyes watered.
At this point the evening had only just begun.
The empty hour and a half in between Eva and Christmas with the Bauers I filled it up with On the way to love (BNNVARA), in which tantra-Martijn sighed softly that he would like to cuddle naked with two beautiful ladies at the same time. The indefinable feeling became more and more concrete, until I finally found words for it. Namely: if you watch reality and talk shows long enough, you can slowly become convinced that all TV is satire at its core. Parodies of themselves.
By the time the Bauers marched across my screen again, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at anymore. I did know that I appreciated Frans’ sense of drama. After his day at the garden market, he collapsed on the couch. “I am completely broken,” Frans moaned. I felt for him.