Page 34 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

The battle between television and its audiences 25
modes of address and were moved to a later hour in the evening. Instead, prime time
became filled with popular entertainment programmes (TV series, shows, quizzes, and so
on). While still trying to maintain their ideological identity as the basis of their existence,
the broadcasting organizations now wanted to address a general mass audience.
In Dutch intellectual circles, the advent of TROS was blamed for introducing an
‘Americanized’ commercial logic into the system of Dutch broadcasting. Even the word
‘trossification’ was invented to denote the process of decay—a word which dominated all
Dutch debates about television in the 1970s. In these debates, the 1960s were constructed
as ‘the Golden Age of Dutch television’, during which the broadcasting organizations
accepted their cultural responsibility, whereas the 1970s have been deplored as a period
of decline, in which television became the repository of irresponsible and debased mass
culture. According to Herman Wigbold, a leading Dutch journalist with socialist
affiliations, TROS has been a major cause of this decline because the broadcasting
system
could not hold its own against a new broadcasting organization that was
the very negation of [that] system based as it was upon a conception of
giving broadcasting time to groups that had something to say. It did not
know how to react to an organization that had nothing to say but
nevertheless became a great success.
(Wigbold 1979:225)

Yet is it not possible to interpret this history in another way? What is painfully absent in
Wigbold’s account is the active role of audiences in the whole process of ‘trossification’;
their position is reduced to that of passive target or even victim of developments in which
they have no effectivity of their own. In short, what has been suppressed is that large
numbers of audiences actively welcomed TROS when it came into existence. Thus it is
not true to assert, as Wigbold does, that TROS had ‘nothing to say’, for it is its ‘great
success’ which speaks for itself. At the very least, TROS’s success (and later that of
3
Veronica) can be read as an indication of the fact that many people were not involved in
the existing broadcasting politics, that they didn’t feel represented by the traditional
organizations, and that they were not satisfied with the television offered them. It may be
said that TROS’s success is based on a discontent with the moralizing surveillance or
denial of popular tastes and preferences by the traditional organizations. In other words,
through TROS the ‘silent majority’ spoke. More specifically, it signified a refusal by the
popular audiences to be put into a position from which they were incited to be watching
television: a position from which ‘serious information’ is postulated as the most valuable
part of televisual discourse and ‘entertainment’ is tolerated as a diversion as long as it
gives ‘enjoyment’ and not ‘fun’ (see Smiers 1977:57).
The success of TROS, then, can be interpreted as an articulation of a contradiction
between the way large parts of the television audience define watching television as a
cultural practice, and the ideas about the use of television inscribed within the institution.
Of course, it would be wrong to assert that, with the advent of TROS, the people finally
got what they wanted, as TROS officials would have it. ‘Trossified television’ could only
become so popular because it filled a space left unfilled by the traditional broadcasting
organizations, and because it brought a distinctive mode of address into televisual