Soft porn videos on TV part of ‘crusade’

Press, 13 April 1988, Page 41

Soft porn videos on TV part of ‘crusade’

NZPA-Reuter Hilversum ; I - •: Soft (porn videos, sex ’ advice and graphic depictions of safe! sex tech-, niques J are being shown’ on Dutch television in' spite of criticism from feminists and some politicians. !

The i Veronica broad-, casting company, which' began ! its life illegally booming out ! pop music! from a trawler in the North Sea, says it is still; crusading to (stretch the boundaries of ’Dutch radio! and television.

But others have said the company’s shows, which feature bare breasts and bottoms, are sexist and degrading to women. Critics; are asking whether the Netherlander’ famed liberalism may be allowing broadcasting freedoms to go too far. “The Pin-Up Club” — a monthly half-hour later evening television show which! the company calls “a video version of girly magazines like ‘Playboy’ and ‘Penthouse”’ — is the latest i of the firm’s attempts to keep alive a spirit of openness over the airways dating back to the pioneering years of pirate radio.

“We try to keep up with trends and changes in society,” a Veronica spokesman, Hans van der Wijn, told reporters. “Dutch society is becoming more .and more open. It is no good just copying everyone else. A television station has got to stretch broadcasting boundaries and go a little further.

‘‘‘Pin-up’ is an example of that. More than three million people watch it but most of them refuse to admit it.” A Dutch Parliamentarian, Andree van Es, disagrees. "These sort of programmes carry on as though the feminist movement had never existed. They revolve round men,” she told Reuters. Ms van Es, of the Leftwing Pacifist-Socialist Party, says the programme treats women as sex objects and degrades them.

"I don’t think you can ban it but it certainly deals with women in a very old-fashioned way,” she said. Veronica, one of the eight large private television and radio companies which are slotted

into the schedules of the Netherlands’ two public channels, was bom in the 1960 s as a pirate radio station, illegally transmitting music from a tiny ship anchored in the North Sea. The station was banned from the airwaves in the early 1970 s after international legislation put a stop to pirate channels. It then spent four years battling to find a legal niche in Dutch broadcasting, which requires stations to represent a political, social or religious group.

Veronica did not represent anybody, but it won the right to become a broadcaster when the Dutch Appeal Court ruled that the station had a representative function because it had built up a large following. Now a legal company, its 200-strong staff, housed in plush offices in the small town of Hilversum near Amsterdam, still believe in pushing the limits of broadcasting. Veronica says the soft porn show, launched at the end of 1987, is part of a crusade to try new ideas on radio and television.

Last year, during a

series of programmes on the killer disease; A.1.D.5., it was one of the first stations to show a video of a couple having sexual intercourse using a condom.

The programm showed a man fitting a sheath to his erect penis and switched back' from freeze frame shots illustrating safe sex to a live studio audience ’ for discussion. One of the ( original seven staff and the Netherlands’ first disc jockey, Tineke, says it is this young, innovative attitude to trying ntew ideas which makes iVeronica different from the other broadcasting companies. "If you have a (new idea here, the door is always open for you to express it” Tineke said.! “The staff are young here. It is not such a risky business as it was at the start but we kefep trying new things.” ! Tineke, now 46, was the teenage disc jockey behind Veronica’s first broadcasts, recorded in a cramped two-bedroomed terraced house in Hilversum and transmitted from a trawler in international waters