In RTL Boulevard on Saturday it was extensively about the “drama for John de Mol”. The SBS6 program Avastars, which De Mol says he had been philosophizing about for twenty years, attracted only 304,000 viewers. “A terrible viewing nightmare,” said former program director of SBS6 Tina Nijkamp. Without going into too much detail: in Avastars virtual ‘puppets’ perform based on the movements of a professional dancer and the voice of a well-known singer. These avatars then battle à la The Voice of Holland against each other before a jury. It was like watching a computer game, said entertainment expert Aran Bade, who wondered why no one had said, “John, I wouldn’t do this.” Making a television program was a democratic process, wasn’t it? “Well…”, commented presenter Frank Dane, and most likely put the finger on the sore spot.
There was also attention for Boulevard’s own presenter Bridget Maasland. She would be a guest in the next day The chest (EO), and told there, as was seen in a teaser, how the arrival of her son helped her to cope with the melancholy. “Apparently I didn’t think I was enough to live for, so I was very happy to have such a little bumblebee,” said Maasland. She shook herself at that sentence. Boulevard presenter Dane was also shocked. He still knew Maasland as “the woman who has everything under control”. Well-intentioned, of course, but that comment also illustrated how difficult it is to talk about feelings of depression. We are shocked, and conclude that someone does not have them all in a row.
“It always works out, and if it doesn’t, it’s not the end yet,” she eventually wrote on the coffin.
Opposite presenter Kefah Allush on Sunday evening was a woman with quite recognizable thoughts, in a head that sometimes overflows. In the conversation about life and death, Maasland, for example, indicated that it was “a nice thought” if it was all over after death. Because did she think life was such a task? Actually yes. “I think I have a very black side,” said Maasland. She found out after her mother-in-law died, she was eighteen, it was her second mother. Sometimes, she says, she suddenly couldn’t move, just sit in a chair. “Then I went through the whole list in my head of things I still had to do, and in the end I did nothing. Just staring blankly ahead of me. And then I was angry with myself again for not doing all those things.” What is that darkness then, Allush wondered, and had Maasland ever ‘sent for it’? Of course, she replied, then it would be especially dark. And then what did she do? “Quickly coming up with things to do again.”
The conversation with Allush was sincere and vulnerable, Maasland sometimes reflected on the spot (“Maybe that is flight behaviour?”). But was she really shocked by her own words? The woman who said she hated “all the fringes” of a life in the spotlight, anyone who has an opinion about you. The woman who received death threats because she had a relationship with André Hazes Junior, and people thought something about it. Could that woman really have been frank by accident?
It could be. Perhaps that is also the only way to survive a life in the foreground: not to think too much about what you say, and what others will say about it. Or as Maasland himself put it: the only way to get out of the darkness is to flee to the light. Don’t think too much, just keep going.
“It always works out, and if it doesn’t, it’s not the end yet,” she eventually wrote on the coffin. As tough as the conversation was, she wanted to end with a smile.
Or with a flight, Allush observed.
replaced Rinskje Koelewijn this week.