Page 116 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 104
rejecting this vision of cultural politics as ‘autocratic’, leading to a deep cleavage
between the masses and the cultural leaders. They opted for a ‘democratic’ form of
cultural reform, one that preserved the organic relationship between VARA and the
people who make up its popular constituency (Rengelink 1954).
However, the pre-war VARA tradition, with its self-evident attachment to and
identification with the social democratic subcultural community, increasingly became an
anachronism in the postwar period. VARA too needed to modernize in order to keep up
with the larger social context in which it operated. This modernization process has been a
very painful one, and in a sense it still goes on today. It is a process which can be
described as one of VARA in feverish search for a new concept of audience. By the late
1980s, VARA had come a long way from being an association fostered by rank-and-file
socialists as ‘our’ mouthpiece, to a modern broadcasting organization which, as we shall
see, aggressively attempted to enlarge its share of the audience market. This
transformation was only possible through a rethinking of the articulation of the popular
and the progressive—a process which instigated intense, often heated debate tormenting
VARA managers and programme makers for years.
The 1960s are still generally remembered and celebrated by Dutch sociologists and
journalists alike as the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch television (Bank 1986). Because television
has the potential to familiarize the entire population with ideas and worlds they had not
known before, the medium as such was perceived to have a progressive impact on Dutch
society by breaking open the closed parochialism of pillarized culture (Ellemers 1979;
Wigbold 1979; Manschot 1987). VARA has been credited with playing a major part in
this by operating at the cutting edge of the then emerging ‘current affairs’ programming,
in which journalists took a much less submissive stance towards authorities than had until
then been usual, and by transmitting irreverent satirical programmes.
It is worth noting, in passing, that these programming strategies were heavily
influenced by developments within the BBC at that time, under the leadership of Hugh
Greene. For example, VARA adapted the BBC’s well-known satirical programme That
Was The Week That Was to a Dutch version, called Zo is het (That’s the way it is), which
became a cause célèbre in the history of Dutch television for its heavily controversial
11
impact, both inside and outside VARA. One instalment in which the act of television
viewing was depicted as a ritual of religious devotion, transmitted in January 1964,
provoked such widespread official and popular indignation that VARA management
decided to cancel the programme—much to the dismay of the programme makers
concerned (Daudt and Sijes 1966; Pennings 1985a). In more general terms, this incident
marked a new direction in public service programming: a programming that included
iconoclastic items that could provoke, even shock and disturb the audience. ‘Serving the
public’ here even implies antagonizing substantial proportions of the audience, as Greene
12
would have it (Briggs 1985:331).
All in all, these programmes were cancelled because they were based upon a
philosophy that was neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘popular’ in the traditional sense. But they
indicated that at least some VARA programme makers had become increasingly self-
conscious about the relative autonomy of their job. Like their BBC colleagues, they too,
especially the younger ones who got their jobs in the early 1960s, had begun to embrace
the professional attitude (Bardoel et al. 1975). In defining what was progressive, they
departed from a formal alliance with the ideas of democratic socialism and exhibited a