Dutch Courage

The Battle of Ph.O.R.N.

Halfway the Double Dutch War, The Queen realised he didn’t have enough cash to keep his army fighting or even to suppress the innocent. With moving to Eindhoven, The Queen captured the ancient industrial areas of the Phillips company. Putting up a high fence around it, nailed signs with “Top Secret” on it and renaming the area Ph.O.R.N., which stands for Phillips Optical Research Network, the Queen came back into battle with one of the most dangerous weapons ever known to man. The old owners of the company could be heard spinning in their graves.
The old laboratories were redecorated and red light bulbs lit the rooms in a cozy pink, that was nothing like the hard TL-light that used to be there. In this surrounding The Queen had his scientist develop the “V3k” weapon, the code name for Video3000. This video system excelled in bringing alive the trade of illegal porn movies throughout Holland. The exclusive movies from the Ph.O.R.N. studios were only available on Video3000 tapes, thus forcing all fans of the genre to buy the Video3000 hardware. The initial sales were high enough to finance the war.
The Holland Dutch wanted to come back with better movies, including live shot tapes from the Amsterdam RLD and a relaunch of the popular FIOD-sponsored TV-show “Big Fuckup”, but failed to rebuild their studios of Aalsmeer, that were grown over with the more dubious kinds of plants after they had been destroyed by the flood. Instead, the smuggle and illegal copying of the Video3000 tapes became popular, but was not enough to stop the cash flow to the Netherlands. It was The Netherlands who had won the Battle of Ph.O.R.N.
Even worse, it turned out many citizens of Holland helped finance the war against them by buying Video3000 products. The FIOD answered this by putting an enormous tax rate on all kind of video products; watching TV became almost impossible for the common people. Some old TV sets were kept in secret closets, if the FIOD discovered these illegal TVs they would be destroyed. This basically was the end of TV in Holland.
Video3000 is still a popular export product in Europe. The studios in Eindhoven are the largest in this part of the world, bigger than those of Aalsmeer ever were, and cashing more Euros than the traditional ones in Hilversum (now lost under the waves) ever did.