Angela de Jong is old-fashioned hard through the wringer by her teasing spirit Marcel van Roosmalen. “Suddenly I remembered why she is such a disturbing element in the public debate.”
Marcel van Roosmalen has hated Angela de Jong for years. He is annoyed that she herself has become part of the television world she writes about and thinks that she appears on television far too often. Is that all? No, Angela’s ‘straight face’ is also an irritation factor in the Van Roosmalen house.
Horrifying movie
Now Marcel strikes mercilessly again. The reason? Angela has one in the AD column written about the Videoland documentary ‘Kees flies out’, in which the well-known autistic Kees Momma is central. It is a sequel to the acclaimed NPO documentary from 2014, when he was in his late forties.
At the time, Kees lived in a chalet with his parents in the garden, because he could not live independently. Nine years later, little has changed, writes Angela. “However, there is one important difference with 2014: his parents are deteriorating rapidly. That makes Kees flies out especially a harrowing film.”
Criticize Mommy
Then Angela gives a pithy comment on the way Kees was brought up: “The last thing you want as a viewer is to criticize Kees’ sweet mummy, who devoted every second of her life to her needy son. But a mother can also love her child too much.”
According to Angela, it is ‘clearly obvious’ that this was not in his interest. “It is impossible for him to stand on his own two feet. That becomes painfully clear as soon as she starts showing the first signs of dementia in the documentary.”
Marcel annoyed
And it is precisely this criticism that annoys Marcel. He dedicates his whole NRC column to Angela. “The antipathy had subsided for a while, but suddenly I remembered why I find AD television woman Angela de Jong such a disturbing element in the public debate.”
He continues relentlessly: “It’s not even her thick-wood-saw-your-board opinions about television that she pours into crooked sentences, nor her cackling about it in all the talk shows – I’m slowly starting to believe that.”
Old-fashioned vision
No, it’s her old-fashioned vision, according to Marcel. “It’s because she likes to mix television criticism with a vision of society that dates from the time just before the vacuum cleaner.”
According to him, Angela is the ‘nosy neighbor who comes back unsolicited’ and then criticizes everything. “Like you should have thrown your autistic son out of the house sooner.”
chatter
If her own family ever goes off the rails, Marcel believes that everyone should also be allowed to get involved, for example by blaming it on precious family time lost to ‘all that chatter about television on all channels’.
“She would have done that herself.”