Presenters looking for a TV show; there are plenty of them wandering around in Hilversum. They are on the payroll of a broadcaster, but they do not find something suitable so quickly, or the channel manager refuses to let them through. You have Emma Wortelboer (1996); promising for a while, got a lot of attention and hatred in 2019 for her vociferous jubilation on it Eurovision songfestival, gave sex tips Squirt and Swallow and in Emma’s Peep Show on YouTube, and was a regular guest on other people’s programs.
Now the talented presenter finally gets her own program: You get that when you’re older. She mediates in conflicts between adolescents and parents. Help TV. The first episode features the overprotective Kitty who keeps her 18-year-old Aleze so tight that she has little freedom or a social life. Here I explain the problem in one sentence, but it takes Wortelboer ten minutes. Reality, as we know, is extremely viscous, with a lot of repetition and an astonishingly low information density. The chosen path to salvation is also curious: Mother Kitty has to go to some kind of yoga therapist and a talk show. Daughter Aleze gets vague resilience training and goes skydiving. Fortunately, mother cooperates well and quickly gives the key to her protective behaviour: she herself was raped when she was eighteen and she wants to protect her daughter from that. Security versus freedom.
Conscientious auxiliary TV
Wortelboer’s talent does not come into its own in this program. She’s normally shameless, quick-witted, a little odd – but you don’t see that here. She does it conscientiously and subdued, maybe that’s already a lot in auxiliary TV. Search a little further for a suitable program for this special presenter.
Twan Huys had in College Tour another big catch: Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It’s very famous for something it didn’t make: the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, which is based on an Atwood novel. In addition to being a celebrated writer, she is also a feminist figurehead – plenty to talk about. But asking further questions about one subject is not Huys’s strength, he prefers to brush over everything. Dead husband? Finch. Trump? Finch. Criticism of lack of black people in her novel? Finch. He hardly deals with her books – apart from that one film novel from 1985. Atwood apparently didn’t feel like going into anything more deeply. But she had some beautiful sentences and her majesty came across well.
Eva Jinek had an even more famous guest: Ed Sheeran. The popular British artist (billions of streams) was on vacation for a year and a half due to the birth of his daughter and other domestic worries – deceased boyfriend, quarter life crisis – and now he’s back with a new album. The singer-songwriter is an unlikely world star: red man with acoustic guitar in a hoodie, no beauty, type of sympathetic neighbor – that also makes him a pleasant guest to listen to. That such an ordinary boy then tells anecdotes about calling Elton John and Bono from U2 gives an extra strong effect. And then he picks up his guitar and suddenly starts singing. Shivers!