There is a lot of talk on Dutch television and most of it can be quickly forgotten, but that certainly does not apply to a number of excellent interviews I saw in the new year.
The series started in the first week of 2024 Winter guests at the VPRO with Janine Abbring as interviewer. For some inexplicable reason, that series, broadcast on four consecutive days, received little attention in the written press this time. Winter guests is a much longer existing, more concise version of Summer guests and revolves around high-level foreign guests. This year was Janine Abbring – already known for Summer guests – the interviewer on duty again.
Abbring already showed himself to be a decent interviewer in Zomergasten, but in Winter guestswhich is in contrast to Summer guests is not broadcast live, she seems to feel even more at ease. In excellent English and well prepared, she went into depth with four not exactly 'easy' guests: economist Noreena Hertz, writer and theater maker Nino Haratischwili, zoologist and climate activist George Monbiot and trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf. It was about their youth, their profession, their ambitions and their view of the world. Just like in Summer guests the guest can explain his ideas based on a number of film fragments. Summer guests sometimes it takes too long for me Winter guests I rarely get that feeling.
A good TV interview is more likely to make you emotional than a well-written interview. The voices, the facial expressions, the hesitations, the silences – they are so much more difficult to make tangible on paper. At the same time, the chance of kitsch on TV is much greater than in the written media. The TV interviewer dances on the edge of a ravine filled with fake emotions.
The TV interviewer who rarely or never steps in is Jeroen Pauw. He combines a loose, light-hearted style with fearless curiosity, with which he persuades the other person to have a carefree kind of candor.
A textbook example of this was Pauw's farewell interview with Dries van Agt. It took place in 2015 with the agreement that it would only be broadcast after Van Agt's death.
It became a wonderful, sometimes even moving, interview in which Van Agt spoke as candidly about his weaknesses as he did about the highs and lows in his political life. Everything, well, a lot of it was discussed: his doubts about his faith, Joop den Uyl (“A pushy, but not an unreasonable man”), Queen Beatrix (with whom he had a “difficult relationship”), his call for a “spiritual revival”. ” to prevent “the destruction of the earth,” the Palestinian issue.
What was he most ashamed of afterwards, Pauw asked. He admitted that as a politician he had hardly been home for 11.5 years, and had therefore left the raising of his children entirely to his wife (“the girl”). It may sound coquettish on paper, but you have to hear and see Van Agt.
We have many good TV interviewers. Can't the very best – for me Janine Abbring, Jeroen Pauw, Coen Verbraak and Jeroen Wollaars – alternately conduct a long interview every week with everyone who has something to say? The title is obvious: 'The interview of the week'.
#Column #Van #Agt
