Afscheid nemen van mens-erger-je-niet en de Bonte Dinsdagavondtrein

This paper focuses on the introduction of television in Dutch society in the fifties and the beginning of the sixties. In the first years of national Dutch broadcasting the expansion of the medium developed rather slowly. This mainly had to do with the frugal economic climate the country was in after the Second World War. It would take until the mid fifties before the tube would start entering the living rooms of the mass. But what was the effect of this conquest of the television into Dutch family life? This paper aims to answer this question, by looking at the way the introduction of the medium is constructed by women, men and children who witnessed this introduction in their homes. A media-archaeology approach, combined with discourse analyses is used to reveal the attitudes on this subject of people who now are 65 years or older. The results can be read two ways. In one way people construct the medium as a social one that brought a cinema in the home and offered a frame on the world. These feelings are mainly positive and concentrate on the early days of television in the Netherlands. By the time television is domesticated in society – the mid sixties -, people tend to construct television as a medium with a negative connotation: television took over the place of pastimes that were more ‘cosy’ and moreover television made society more individual. Television, in other words, marked the change to a newer era. An era in which youngster created their own subculture, in which people became more wealthy and had more free time on their hand and in which protest would follow after protest. In the minds of the respondent, television is sort or less to ‘blame’ for this change.