Earlier this week, I was in the Netherlands on a flying visit for work. Commitments duly met, I retired to my hotel room (which featured an overwhelming and unsettling smell of bleach, triggering my CSI spidey-sense) and turned on the television. I once read a piece in the now defunct Jane magazine in which the writer said she always visited a nail salon whenever in a new, unknown city to get a taste of local life. I have adopted this philosophy enthusiastically, but modified it to include using the public transport system and watching local television. From this fleeting visit, I can give you two bits of information in these realms: one, trams are excellent, and should be adopted in far more places in the UK; and two, the Dutch have no problem with topless ladies after a certain hour.
I speak no Dutch; despite being a Yoruba speaker by virtue of Nigerian roots, I am peculiarly British in all matters of language i.e. talking a bit louder in English and gesturing like a mad thing. Television being a visual medium is a great leveller, therefore, and I took full advantage of this. And so it came to pass that at 1:30am in a sterile hotel room in an unknown city, I settled in to watch an episode of Take Me Out, in Dutch. Are you a fan of Take Me Out? It’s cracking good telly, I can tell you that. It is a magnifying glass, further exposing the love and sex lives of a large swathe of young heterosexual people in Britain. It’s hosted by Peter Kay’s old pal Paddy McGuinness, who spouts inane catchphrases (“let the winkle see the picker!”, “let the treasure see the chest!” etc.) that make the audience – surely the easiest in the UK today – splutter and laugh wildly. And now we’ve exported the format, like we did with Strictly Come Dancing (sold to over 30 countries so far, and by far the BBC’s greatest export), but not Big Brother (technically, that was Dutch to begin with, fact fans).
Dutch TMO works on the same principle as its forebear. Thirty or so women stand in the studio and wait for a man to come down the “love lift” (this is not a euphemism, sadly). He selects the music he descends to – one guy in this epispode chose Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “No Church In The Wild”, which to my mind, is not exactly conducive to romantic inclinations. But what do I know – the young man was rewarded with a sun and ski date with a beautiful woman. How he got there remained largely the same as the UK version: he stood before the women, they did an instant judgement and those who found him wanting switched off their lights.
Then there was “banter” from the Dutch Paddy: in this case he was younger, fitter-looking, and objectively speaking, more handsome. He also exuded that vaguely oily charm that certain men just can’t help. I watched him, smiling and sliming his way around the women, asking why they had turned off their lights and my lips formed into a moue of disapproval, a cat’s bum of a mouth. At one point, he reached a very tall woman who had switched off and asked why she had; the words “giant woman” leapt out in English at me. The audience roared, the woman laughed. But even in Dutch, it was easy to read “look at this jocular douchebag” in her eyes. It all felt very familiar: the host mugging to camera, the tiny dresses made of stretchy fabric, the over-animated facial expressions, the willingness to be made a gentle fool of, the sheer terror in some of the men’s eyes… And it was subtly different too: the women waited until the end of segments to turn off their lights, like a polite university admissions panel. The paired off couple got to pick the destination of their date from a handful of options, like old school Cilla used to do on Blind Date. And the send-off music for the dateless man was Blue and Elton John’s “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word”, on which I have two thoughts: Blue was robbed at Eurovision 2011, and this is a much less cruel song than our own “All By Myself” (Celine Dion’s 1996 edition).
From the information in this piece, you may draw your conclusions about my life. I am obsessed with telly, and strangely unashamed of writing as much. But I found it oddly comforting that I could switch on and despite a distinct and unbreachable language barrier find something to watch and engage with. Globalisation is often talked about in terms of commerce and business, and only sometimes culture. It seems to me that culture, especially the “low” status of television is producing a very different kind of TV viewer. You could argue it’s no great thing that we have the same old shows everywhere in the world, but that would be to ignore the inevitable. Human beings live in tribes, and we tend to like the same things. But thankfully, there are also enough of us to keep things diverse and interesting. For me, brushing my teeth in the small hours of cold night in Rotterdam, it was a pleasure to see if not a familiar face, then a familiar format.
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