Tweet12-03-2010 om 10:41 by Sueli Brodin

My earliest memory of watching television dates back to the year 1970. I was four years old and we lived in Islamabad, Pakistan. We had a small black and white television set at home, where we watched the American science fiction series Star Trek, or long Bollywood style films featuring a lot of music and dancing, and bearing romantic titles such as “The Princess of Cashmere”. My younger sister and I were fans of Sesame Street and used to sing along with the opening credits: “Sunny day, Sweepin' the clouds away… Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street!”

When we arrived in our new home in Tokyo, Japan, in August 1972, I discovered an abandoned television set in an otherwise empty bedroom and my first contact with the Japanese language and the magical world of Japanese anime happened that evening with an episode of “Mahou tsukai no Sally”.

As soon as I was able to decipher some basic Japanese characters, one of my favourite weekly activity was to canvass the television guide in search for children anime series, music shows, foreign series such as The Little House on the Prairie, The 6 Million Dollar Man, and Japanese samurai films.

The annotation of television guides became a habit that I have kept until now. But here in the Netherlands, even if a Dutch programme looks appealing at first sight, I have discovered that the acronym of the broadcaster indicated between brackets next to the title is something also needs to be considered before making too hasty a selection.

The Dutch public broadcasting system is very unique in that it consists in a variety of member based broadcasting organisations defined by their ideological orientation.



Dutch public broadcasters

Any organisation that is able to gather a minimum of 50,000 members can become a broadcasting company and be allotted radio and television airtime on the three public channels. Many broadcasters publish their own television guides and every subscriber automatically becomes a member of the organisation.

My mother in law who belongs to the Dutch Protestant Reformed church has been a faithful subscriber to the NCRV television guide for as long as my husband can remember. The guide is published by the public broadcaster NCRV (Dutch Christian Radio Association) favoured by Dutch Protestants. Logically enough, she also reads the Protestant Christian newspaper Trouw and votes for the Christian Democratic party.

My husband says that his family is a typical product of the pillarisation which used to characterise Dutch society up until recently and which is still apparent in the Dutch broadcasting system.

By telling any Dutch person that my husband and I subscribed to the television guide published by the public broadcaster VPRO, I automatically reveal our non-religious inclination and our progressive political views. We will probably be categorised as readers of the Volkskrant or the NRC newspapers rather than the Telegraph or Trouw and as centre left voters.



VPRO TV guide

Unsurprisingly, most of the Dutch programmes that I circle every week with my black pen happen to be produced by VPRO, whether they are television films or series (Bernhard), talk shows (“Zomer/Wintergasten”) or documentaries (Metropolis). They seldom disappoint us.

Last week, I had meant to start following a new historical drama series called “De Troon” (The Throne) about the lives of the Dutch kings William I, William II and William III. But when my husband saw that the series was an AVRO production, he shook his head and sighed: “Let’s not, AVRO is so conventional. How about Deadline instead, the new VARA thriller series?”



Deadline

As I struggled to recall the ideology VARA stands for, I couldn’t help let go a smile and ask myself: “Do all Dutch people think and talk like my husband when they read their TV guide? .. Or is he more pillarised than he cares to admit?”

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