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Column: Breakfast with Kate2 October 2009 Zie Nederlandse versieby Arnold Jansen op de Haar Watching Breakfast TV is one of my worst addictions. Not just any breakfast show but the one shown on BBC1. An added advantage is that GMT is a whole hour behind the continental European time shown on the clock at home in Arnhem.
Whenever Kate Silverton presents it makes my day. It suddenly occurs to me that if I was living in Moscow I could stay in bed until midday dreaming of Kate.
I always got the impression that Kate was the real bloke of the two presenters on the sofa, at least until she turned up in another BBC programme rising up from below the crushing waves. Kate, wearing a wetsuit, was apparently in training for some sort of exercise involving a wild-water kayak.
She was without her glasses and was shivering whilst squinting into the camera. Most adorable!
When I see her in the mornings, I think of the wetsuit, and her image has changed completely.
At that time in the morning I am also not yet properly dressed. So I imagine myself to be the short man next to Kate on the sofa, Bill Turnbull, who we have named Little Bull in my family.
Yes, who wouldn’t feel like a small bull and have fun when you get to sit next to Kate Silverton, Susanna Reid or Sian Williams?
Last week Sian went all the way to the Labour Party Conference to interview the Prime Minister. He in his usual manner was gasping for air like a fish out of water. It always reminds me of a sturgeon, a fish with a precarious future. Sian had just confronted him with the latest headline in The Sun: ‘LABOUR’S LOST IT’. ‘Don’t forget this gets read by seven million people,’ she added mercilessly. ‘Actually it is three million,’ replied an out-of-the-water Brown, fact obsessed referring to the circulation figures. Sian chose to ignore this reply, a fatal snub! She pressed on briskly and asked him how he felt when his wife introduced his speech at the party conference. From his reply it became clear that Brown had added a sheepish smile to his search for fresh air. Breakfast TV tells you a lot about a country’s taste in women. Female British Breakfast presenters are both sexy and bitchy. The men, in contrast, are really pussycats.
It is early in the morning and you do not want to give anyone a rude awakening, except when referring to politics - when the tactics change and the Jeremy Paxman that lives in all of us shines through. Apart from political issues, everyone is on their best positive behaviour.
When Chris Hollins joins the duo on the sofa we move to the sports section. For example, when discussing tennis and it happens that a British player - this used to be Henman, nowadays it is Murray - comes close to getting into the mythical Wimbledon final, there is no end to the stories. Landmarks are renamed: Henman Hill and Murray Mount. Well, in the Netherlands we do have a more recent Wimbledon champion, Richard Krajicek. Do we rename our shores to Krajicek Coast? Most certainly not, we are far too busy complaining about the fact that Krajicek just won the one Grand Slam. Another example, a Brit comes 83rd in the Olympic Games but runs a personal record; praise is bound to be heaped on to him, even more so if it is also a National Record.
Poor Dutch sporting heroes can do no good. Recently a Dutch cyclist was 6th in the Tour of Spain, the best Dutch performance in a major cycling tour in recent decades, but he was deemed a failure because he didn’t manage to cling on to his 2nd place.
Carol Kirkwood is the weather expert. She always appears live from the Blue Peter Garden. This week she told us in what to me always sounds like a heavy Scottish accent: ‘Wet and windy... very wet and windy for some of us.’ In our family we would declare the weather atrocious.
Carol, however, always stays positive: ‘There could be one or two breaks here and there.’ Very clever to have a weather presenter from Scotland; I suggest that Dutch TV hires an Eskimo, – that way the weather would never be disappointing.
In The Netherlands we consider the BBC as the epitome of public broadcasting. This is the de facto standard. Just for clarification, Dutch Breakfast TV is not presented by an Eskimo but by a fairly ugly bloke named Sven Kockelmann.
Well, each country gets the presenters it deserves. Sven just sits on his own behind a table, constantly looking in fairly low spirits. Is Dutch brown bread and cheese not a good enough foundation to present Breakfast TV compared to a full English breakfast?
To be fair, Kockelmann manages to get through the programme bravely. But making your day when clad in a wetsuit? Not really.
© Arnold Jansen op de Haar
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