That’s how Han was: amiable. He was the first person I thought of when I got the assignment. If anyone was an institution in television making and knowledgeable about the truly great TV personalities of the last seventy years, it was Han. A walking media encyclopedia.
He made 95 portraits for his program TV Monument, of which not even all episodes have been broadcast yet. However, the real TV Monument was Han himself. Are To be continued is one of those iconic programs that belong to the television heritage of the Netherlands. In 2011, Han told de Volkskrant that he was still addressed on the program, and that will not have been different in recent years.
Han Peekel was fascinated by television and theater from an early age, I read somewhere. In my own childhood I was as obsessed with television as he was. He once said that as a child – he was of the first generation to have a TV at home – he could watch a train with the word ‘pause’ on it for three quarters of an hour, mesmerized, passing through the screen.
I liked cartoons
and cartoons
better than stocks
I myself lay on my stomach on the floor as a ten-year-old watching the stock price on Teletext when nothing else was on TV – I knew what stocks my father owned and was happy to keep an eye on the stock market for him before the Wednesday afternoon programming started.
Of course, I also watched at that age To be continued. I liked cartoons and cartoons even more than stocks. Still, I don’t think about it To be continued or even on TV Monument when I think of Han. I think of my old neighbor. When my father Willem started to have a bit of fun in TV land, he bought a bungalow in a dead end street in Hilversum, near the Media Park, which was then just the NOS site.
The street was a village within a village: children played together, women gossiped about each other, my father walked in at Han Peekel to brainstorm and ask advice about his career and the profession. We as children were the same age as the Peekel daughters, and grew up with them for the first four years of my life – then we moved to a bigger villa, I think Han had given my father good advice.
I had no idea who Han was, except for my friends’ father, who lived across the street. He was just always there. Decades later, he was also there when you needed a few quotes about the profession. But now Han is gone. What a loss. He will be sorely missed.
Suus Ruis
Suus Ruis is a journalist, author, screenwriter and RTV expert
Photo: Mark Uyl
