Page 118 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 106
too far beyond the structural limits within which a broadcasting institution, no matter how
socialist, has to take care of its own conditions of reproduction. The popular/progressive
couplet served as the preliminary guarantee in this respect.
Lack of popularity was the main criticism issued against the programming strategies
of the experimenters: while the 1960s’ satirists were accused of elitism, the 1970s’
radical socialists were accused of ‘proletarian romanticism’ (Pennings 1985b). However,
it is important to note that the requirement for VARA to be popular was never meant to
be at odds with its identity as a progressive broadcasting organization. Again and again,
the management continued to formulate idealistic visions of VARA’s normative purpose.
In 1969, it was stated that VARA should be a broadcasting organization ‘for all those in
the Netherlands who demand a progressive and radical policy on the cultural, social, and
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political terrains’ (VARA Gids 1969:10). In 1978, chairman André Kloos reiterated that
VARA is ‘a political and cultural instrument for progressive Netherlands’ (Kloos 1978).
In 1983, under the leadership of chairman André van den Heuvel, a shift in choice of
words: VARA needs to be a ‘left-wing people’s broadcasting organization’ (VARA
1983b). And in 1987, chairman Marcel van Dam states that VARA wants to be a
‘progresssive humanist organization’ (in Ang and Tee 1987). All these discursive
formulas, abstract as they are, are intended to sustain, again and again, the assumption
that VARA does not have to choose between being popular and being progressive, but
can be both. How to be popular and progressive, that’s the question.
The desire to articulate popularity and progressiveness then is both a normative and a
strategic issue for VARA, having everything to do with the widening gap between
broadcasting institution and audience from the early 1970s onwards. In a sense, all the
debates in the experimental phase were conducted in the comfortable assumption, right or
wrong, that in principle there was a natural audience out there for VARA programming:
these were generally debates which revolved around VARA’s philosophically-
constructed relationship to some ideal-typical audience (the audience that needed to be
reformed, shocked, or mobilized), not about VARA’s practical relationship to actual
audiences. Gradually, however, VARA was confronted with a new situation: it became
aware that having an audience, a very basic question, could not be taken for granted; that
the audience should be conquered.
In the Netherlands too, it was the emergence of competition that propelled this
situation. In 1967, a new Broadcasting Act was implemented that opened up the Dutch
system for newcomers. A new organization, TROS, came into being and contrary to the
established, pillarized broadcasting organizations, VARA included, TROS did not seek
legitimacy by referring to an ideological or religious identity, but by—the phrase sounds
familiar—‘giving the audience what it wants’. TROS derived its programming strategies
from American commercial examples: it transmitted showy programmes with a style of
presentation full of pizazz, with which Dutch audiences were largely unfamiliar until
then. While not a commercial organization in the economic sense of the term, TROS’s
methods were. Popularity in its strictly quantitative meaning was its chief aim. Not
surprisingly, it did attract large audiences, at the cost of the other, established
organizations. The latter panicked, and began to search for ways for the counter-attack.
They mostly did this by adopting the very same programming methods TROS used:
providing more light entertainment, American drama series and snappy current affairs
programmes—a development that came to be known as the ‘trossification’ of Dutch