by Google
Patrik Herman, a well-known presenter from shows such as Lampáreň or Reflex, speaks openly about his childhood in a family of teachers, the difficult life trials that shaped him, and his work on Markíza and RTVS television channels. In the interview, you will learn about his work with the civic association Nie rakovine, memories of Trnava, and his challenges for the younger generation.
Patrik, you come from a family of teachers. How did it affect you?
It's not easy to have teachers in your family. My mother was a teacher, my grandfather was a teacher and principal of an elementary school, my aunt also taught - simply the whole family was teachers. We, the children, were guinea pigs for all the tests and exams. One minus was a bad grade for us, but I'm not complaining. On the other hand, it taught me a lot of things that I later appreciated.
Apart from coming from a family of teachers, what kind of childhood did you have?
I grew up in a family where my parents divorced – twice in fact. Today I have many brothers, but only one sister, whom I always tell is the best sister in the world. Of course, divorce and a broken family took their toll on us. There were times that were really difficult. At one point, I even almost found myself on the street with my brother. It was a difficult situation, but now, with hindsight, I realize that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
I later found accommodation thanks to good people who helped me. I remember living in a high school dormitory, where the cooks would leave me leftover food in the evenings when I came home from school and work. These small gestures from good people kept me going. There were a lot of positive things around me and even more good people who helped me get through that difficult time. Without their help, I probably wouldn't have been able to do it myself.
Did you want to be a moderator since you were little?
I never thought I would become a moderator – the only one who suspected it was my grandmother. She knew it when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I was sick at her place, sitting on the couch with an open diary and reading from it like a Czechoslovak television announcer. I even read the obituary of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.
You may not have lived at that time, in fact, I'm not even sure if I lived during his lifetime. However, I remember that one Soviet official died. And it's strange what a person remembers from childhood - you can push out a lot of things, but some details remain. For example, I still remember his position: he was the General Secretary of the Constitutional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
My grandmother said at the time: "You will be the moderator." However, I only found out about it much later, in high school.
What moments from your student days do you still remember and how they shaped you?
Everyone has a professor in high school who they respected – such a legend. At the Trnava grammar school we had a Slovak teacher who also achieved this status with me. I remember how she once refused to accept my essay on the topic "The Hard Life of a Student". I handed it in after the deadline because I was sick. Her reaction was: "You were at home, you were bored, you were doing nothing, you could have written it and sent it. You got an A. Feel free to send it to the newspaper now."
I'm not the type to do things out of spite, but I decided to give it a try. I sent the reflection to the district newspaper and about two weeks later it was published as an editorial in the weekly Trnavský hlas. I received my first fee for it – about 50 or 60 cents. Along with the fee came an offer to collaborate, so I started contributing regularly. Of course, the professor noticed. One day, during chemistry class, she pulled me out of the classroom by the ears and took me to a room where the older students were preparing the school magazine. She said to me: “You will write here.” And so I started. At that moment, I literally fell in love with writing and with our school magazine, which was called Blesk, later Nový Blesk. Our chemistry professor then came up with a brilliant idea – she invented a “relief coupon”. We published this coupon in the magazine. The student could write it out and hand it in at the beginning of the day, which excused him from exams and papers. It was a marketing move that made the magazine extremely popular. We sold more of it, we had more money, and so we could invest in better technology and better quality paper.
With this success, we participated in the Slovak school magazine competition in Zvolen. There we presented our idea, and a year later magazines all over Slovakia had it. Today I am a judge of this competition and some magazines still use our "freebie coupon".
Do you remember your first audition in the media?
I had a group of people who noticed that I had a microphonic voice. I didn't realize it at all - after all, everyone feels that their voice sounds strange when they listen to themselves. However, my friends entered me for an audition, which I passed, and so I became a host of a commercial station that had coverage in western Slovakia at the time.
I hosted free blocks, morning and evening broadcasts, and we even had a student column. Those were great times. Sometimes I broadcast until midnight and again from five in the morning, so there was no point in going home. I often slept on the radio on an inflatable mattress, and later other colleagues joined this habit.
It had its own charm. After the evening broadcast, I prepared a CD and a jingle and in the morning I would get up just a few minutes before the broadcast started. Since no one could see me, I sat down at the microphone in my shorts, sometimes with a T-shirt, sometimes without one, still with my eyes glued shut. I played a jingle, welcomed the listeners, and played as many songs as possible so that I could brush my teeth and prepare for the next broadcast in the meantime. By 30 minutes, when my colleagues started arriving, I was already combed, dressed, and ready to continue.
And what about the audition for Markíza?
My friend Matúš was waiting for me in front of my house in his Fiat Punto on the morning of the audition and literally kidnapped me to the audition. Without him, I wouldn't have made it to Bratislava, so he kept me there against my will. There were about 3,000 people at the audition, it lasted two or three days, and they only selected three.
During those days, we were given countless tasks. I remember that I made it to the final round, where I had to perform a live entry. Imagine the situation: you are on the D1 highway near Piešťany, where a mass traffic accident had just occurred. I had 30 seconds to prepare and I had to start my one-minute live entry within exactly 30 seconds. It was a challenging task, but I managed it.
The head of the commission Peter Susko looked at me and said: “Okay, Patrik, but our assumption is that news editors will always tell the truth, will not mislead or lie. And you think we can’t do math?” I didn’t understand what he was talking about. They sent me away and I had no idea what had happened.
It was only later that I learned that the problem was in the application form. There was an age box, and since they were looking for editors over 25, my age of 21 was a problem. However, the application form was written by Matúš, and I didn’t know what he wrote there. I couldn’t even admit it. I was leaving destroyed, after three demanding days that seemed wasted to me. I was already turning the handle when suddenly someone said: “Goodbye doesn’t mean goodbye. See you on Monday.” And that was the moment.
Your career began in the news. How do you remember this period and the situations you had to face?
The younger generation mostly knows me from Lampárna or Reflex, but few remember that I started my career in television news as a reporter. At the beginning, I was only in charge of education and social affairs - after all, I was still a "little ear". I preferred to avoid politics.
At that time, however, Slovakia was going through a turbulent period of mafia rule. The mafia was literally carving up the country and crime was reaching incredible proportions. So where would you send an editor at 1 am to the scene of a crime, where someone had been shot - for example, in front of a hotel in Bratislava? Of course, they sent the youngest, single and childless one - me. In the end, there were only two of us left to cover the most turbulent years of the underworld – me and Eva Černá.
During that period, I experienced several unpleasant moments. I lived in a sublet in Dúbravka, and the people who rented me an apartment had no idea that one morning I had found a severed cat's head on my doormat. Another time, "thick-necked" boys were waiting for me in front of the house, who put me in a car and drove me to the Bratislava freezers. One of the underworld bosses was based there, and he needed to talk. He made it clear to me that my reports were complicating his business – especially those that reported on assassination attempts on him. After such reports, no one wanted to make any further deals with him. He explained to me “in a friendly way” that he did not want me to report on him further.
These were moments full of pressure, but otherwise they could not have hurt me. Perhaps the ratings and popularity of television protected me to some extent. If something happened to me, everyone would immediately know who was behind it.
What are your memories of Lampáreň? Did you also receive any bizarre complaints?
About a third of the complaints we receive are really bizarre. I often think to myself: “For God’s sake, what are these people doing?” For example, someone has a hectare of land, but they argue with their neighbor about one centimeter. When people ask me about the success rate of cases, I answer that half of them shouldn't even exist - those problems are solvable.
If a problem arises that really points to a systemic failure, such as a bad law, paragraph, or incorrectly set processes, it can be criticized, pointed out, and asked for correction. But interpersonal relationships, which are based on aversion and malice, cannot be solved even with a report on television. On the contrary, the report can make such a conflict even worse.
How was your civic association NO TO CANCER founded?
The No to Cancer campaign was created in response to the death of my father. We had never had any oncological diseases in our family before, so nothing warned us to be more careful. And yet it happened. My father got colon cancer, but it was already in an advanced stage. I remember exactly the phone call from our family friend, who is a doctor in Myjava. She told me: “Patrik, do something quickly, solve something quickly, because dad has bad results.”
Paradoxically, I spent the most time with my father when he was already in the hospital. We had long conversations and we both knew that the end was coming. We also knew that it could have been prevented. There was a simple preventive test for stool bleeding, which we had no idea about. No one around us, in the family, or in the media talked about it at the time, and the state didn't care about awareness. If dad had taken this test in his fifties, he wouldn't have died three years later.
I remember him once telling me: “Son, you have the ability to make people listen to you. May there be less hell in families.” This sentence of his resonated strongly with me. His death was unnecessary and premature – he was killed by lack of information.
Since then, I have been trying to fix these two things: increase awareness so that people know how to protect themselves, and at the same time help patients who are already fighting cancer. We established patient counseling centers in oncology departments, we currently have five of them.
Why did you decide to move from Markíza to RTVS?
It was very difficult for me to imagine leaving my colleagues. I had incredibly good relationships with them, and that still applies today – we may even meet for coffee more often than when we worked together. Getting my head around the idea of leaving them was challenging.
RTVS I perceived as something more complex. It's still about creating, but it offers me the opportunity to work on a show that has the potential to really help. Of course, the current atmosphere around this institution does not please me at all. It's crazy and scary.
However, if you're wondering why I decided to go there, it's because this opportunity offered me completely new horizons and possibilities.
What are your plans for the future?
I have a huge number of projects and sometimes I don't even know where to start. My goal is to complete at least some of them – whether those related to oncology, prevention or efforts to move the system forward.
I am grateful for every meeting with ZŤP children in Trnava that I have under my care. I really wish and pray that I will always be able to find enough funds for them to go on rehabilitation stays.
This is something that still bothers me – I realize that nothing I do is just about me. I could not do it alone. I always need people to join me, whom I can convince and gain their trust. Fortunately, there are always those who will help, join in and together we can give something to someone. It's all about trust and common effort - when people come together, great things can be achieved.
What would you leave to the younger generation?
What would I leave to the younger generation? Be even more fierce than we were. Take matters into your own hands and move this country forward significantly and faster. We, the middle and older generation, will be immensely grateful to you for that.
