Nog een Artikel met een slecht vertaalde Nederlandse Titel

Last time on the blog, my attempts to track down the obscure 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series brought the attention of Netherlands-based reader David; as the show was a British-Dutch co-production, he was able to provide me with a large number of contemporary pieces about the show's broadcast in the Netherlands from Dutch newspapers. David had a few more notes to give me after reading my resulting piece, which I think deserve a post of their own.

First of all, David cleared up my confusion as to the difference between Dutch television channels:

NED 1 is one of the three non-commercial/public channels in the Netherlands, comparable with BBC 1/2/3, etc. Airtime on these channels is divided among a dozen broadcasts of different religious and social leanings (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Socialist, Liberal, Conservative, etc.). AVRO has the most general background, the A in AVRO also stands for ‘general’.

(David contacted AVRO to see if they still have copies of the TV series, but sadly the series was registered as a British production and is thus not in the Dutch television archive.)

On my theory that a Dutch production company approached Horowitz about the possibility of his writing a TV series set there, and that's how the Diamond Brothers TV series came to be:

In January 1991, a few months before the series was broadcasted in the Netherlands, Horowitz was one of the key guests at Story International in the Netherlands. Famous authors and translators from across the globe were invited to translate the work of Annie M.G. Schmidt during this edition of the literary festival, and Horowitz was claimed to be the most talented translator of all (according to a book on the subject). In short: in the period of the TV series, Horowitz was invited for important literary festivals and other things in the Netherlands. It seems not completely improbable to me, that also Dutch production houses were interested in Horowitz and inspired him to write SBSE.

(The picture at the top of this article is one David sent me of Horowitz at the aforementioned festival; Horowitz himself is in the middle of the back row.)

One other fact David shared with me was that the Dutch translation of South by South East was published over there in March 1991, at the same time as it was in the UK, and accompanying the original broadcast of the TV series. The book's translator, Annemarie van Ewyck, also provided the translated Dutch subtitles for the broadcast of the TV series there (as I mentioned last time, it turns out the series was broadcast in its original English audio with subtitles, rather than being dubbed as I'd previously assumed) -- so she must have translated both the book and the TV series at the same time.

David did agree with me that Dutch newspapers didn't really seem to get Horowitz's sense of humour, and mentioned that the film Just Ask for Diamond had met with a similarly negative response a few years previously. He suggested it would be interesting to see how the British press covered the film at the time, which is an interesting idea that hadn't previously occurred to me; once I've researched the matter you can expect to read about that at some point! (With regards to the novel of Horowitz's that was never released in English I mentioned in the previous post, David also pointed out that it came out in 1999, just one year before the first Alex Rider book, so maybe Horowitz decided on a change of direction at that point and that has something to do with why it wasn't released in the UK.)

All the work David has done on this has been absolutely stellar, and I cannot thank him enough for it