A view of Dutch Breakfast TV

Having haunted the streets, bars, clubs, hotels, live sex shows, strip bars, michelin star restaurants and eetcafes of this fair city for many, many years, it appears that via some strange form of osmosis, that I’ve become reasonably fluent in understanding Dutch. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because when aggressive Dutch ladies say “you’ve lived here for years, how comes you don’t speak Dutch?” I can respond with a spirited “Hou je bek”

The downside of this is that as the shallow man, does like to get an idea of events that are going on in this country, that in the morning I watch Dutch breakfast TV. The choice isn’t particularly large. I can choose between Vandaag de Dag, which translated into English means morning TV for the brain dead or RTL4 breakfast news which is made on such a low budget that many of its news items are clips from You tube.

The only plus point about Vandaag De Dag is that every 30 minutes it broadcasts news from NOS Journal which is a proper BBC like news organisation. The rest of the program is what I would describe as extreme low brow tabloid TV. The women are fairly representative of Dutch womanhood. They wear jeans, and have bad (but at least dry) unkempt hair.

My hairdresser is blind

Amateur time on Dutch Breakfast TV

One of their roving reporters, pictured above is Maaike Timmerman. She puts the A in Amateur. Whenever I see her interviewing someone, she always looks as if she still can’t quite believe that the TV company gave her the job. She’s always incredibly excited, speaks quickly with such a high pitched squeaky voice,  that I have to turn down the volume of TV to double check that a mouse hasn’t entered the room. Another roving reporter of theirs is Leonie ter Braak. They send her off all over the country to ask members of the public critical and probing questions such as “well the good weather is over now, what do you think?” or “What do you think about the William and Maxima becoming king and queen?”

There’s a recession on hence no stylists

High on the agenda of this mornings news was some ex-MTV presenter, ex-footballers wife Sylvie van der vaart. Apparently she’s going through a divorce from her wealthy husband and things are getting messy. This was treated with as much seriousness as the Syrian crisis!

Sylvie, national news on Vandaag de Dag

Another of their presenters used to be Eva Jinek, who while interviewing Richard Gere asked him the most important and difficult question of “how does it feel to be such a sex symbol?”

As I’m concerned about the effect this show is having on my blood pressure, I’m switching back to the BBC and CNN where they at least employ proper non denim wearing journalists with access to a hairdresser with sight and have more to show than celebrity nonsense.