After years of being insulted by the gentlemen, Angela de Jong sat last night in Marcel & Gijs side by side with her teasing spirits for the first time. Did the mega voucher pay off? No, just a mini-clash…
Angela de Jong and Marcel van Roosmalen are like water and fire: they have regularly lashed out at each other in the media for years. He in particular seems to have developed a kind of obsession with the tiger shark of the AD, because she continues to function as a direct object in his cynical pieces and podcast monologues. Last night they finally confronted each other.
Verbal collision
Where she still refused to come by in the first broadcast week of Marcel & Gijs, Angela was now still at the table. And in real life, Marcel seems to prefer Angela to sitting behind his keyboard. The consequence? A relatively good broadcast, without a really hard TV clash. And that was what was hoped for…
Only once does it come to a verbal clash between Angela and Marcel, namely when it comes to the well-known autistic Kees Momma. She has expressed some criticism of his upbringing in the spring. “A mother can also love her child too much,” she wrote in her column. “He can’t possibly stand on his own two feet.”
Life lessons
Marcel attacked Angela about that very hard at the time and he briefly mentions this during their TV meeting. “I think it’s about linking some kind of life lessons to it,” Marcel says irritably.
Colleague Gijs Groenteman: “Do you think that your television column can give you an opinion about how parents raise their children?”
Angela: “No, that’s the lesson I took out for myself and told the readers. And you had trouble with that, I read.”
Neighbor
Marcel thinks it is indeed inappropriate. “Well, I find it difficult when someone is corrected. In you I see the neighbor who looks over the hedge and knows better. I feel that very strongly in your opinion, that you think: oh, he has come to say that it is wrong.”
Angela: “But actually that’s what you do, right? You also know better than anyone in politics or in other areas.”
Marcel: “Well, I don’t know. I’m more into descriptive columnism, so I write more about: Angela de Jong was on a talk show and said this and this and this and this. So I guess I’m not being moralistic.”
Listen back
Angela then bites Marcel: “Then I would listen to a few more, I think, if I were you. (…) But ‘if Angela de Jong’s son should be wrong, then it is her fault’, right? That was in it.”
Marcel: “I would never write it like that. That is the difference between you and me, that I would never write how you should raise your son.”
Angela: “Then I will read it again, but I think it was there.”
Amateur Psychologist
What Angela is probably referring to is this passage out Marcel’s column: “Of course I wish Angela de Jong and her family the best, but if something ever goes off the rails in public, then every amateur psychologist or therapist and everyone else, not hindered by knowledge or experience, may conclude that too much precious family time has been lost by mothers to all that chatter about television on all channels. She would have done that herself.”
Anyway: Angela and Marcel kept it pretty neat during their TV showdown. “In the commercials you are quite nice and you are also quite nice beforehand,” she notes at the end of the broadcast.