Martine Bijl is the kind of multi-talent who dislikes repeating herself. Once she's done something successfully, be it singing, acting, writing, presenting, recording records, working on television or in theater or translating big Broadway musicals before long she'll have had enough of it and go on to the next thing. And she doesn't like to look back and reminisce either. Maybe that's why her comedy variety shows from the Seventies have hardly ever been seen again since...
Starting her public life as a singer, Martine was discovered at the age of 17 by Dutch broadcasting legend Willem Duys and typically she hasn't looked back since. By the mid seventies she had a couple of feature film appearances under her belt (in which she managed to stay fully dressed, no mean feat in the the Netherlands) and became a mainstay as one of the panelists in the long running TV quiz "Wie Van De Drie". In 1976 it was TROS television who gave her a chance to combine her love of songwriting and comedy in her own bi-monthly show simply called Martine (but usually with a number behind the title: Martine V, Martine VI, etc).
In each installment she would introduce several guests, both musical and from stage and screen, with whom she would converse in a variety of different languages. Her actor friends usually appeared in sketches as well and at least one of those in each episode would be a retelling of a classic fairy tale. On top of that Martine performed a plethora of self-penned numbers dealing with a great number of subjects the viewer could identify with. And of course for each of these numbers she would dress up - at one point even playing a teenage boy with aspiration to be a rock star.
One of these shows was chosen to compete for the Rose D'or in Montreux, but alas, after a couple of years Miss Bijl started to lose her interest in doing the show and they began to be broadcast with longer intervals. By the early Eighties Martine decided she wanted to try her luck on stage with her own one-woman shows instead. Of course these too proved to be very successful and eventually were filmed to be broadcast on television.
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