For the third last broadcast of book programme Moped at sea presenters Wilfried de Jong and Ruth Joos drove the car in front of Connie Palmen’s house. Hug, hug. Kiss Kiss. And while embracing Wilfried, Connie Palmen lisps in his ear: “You drive well, don’t you, Wilfried?”
She’s so scared of death, she says, when she’s sitting next to someone in the car. “I’m going completely crazy, right down to the steering wheel pulls.” That means sitting in the back all the way to Paris, part dozing, part singing, and shouting one more time that she doesn’t want to die on the way to Paris. “Although Camus preceded me.”
This is the second time that the book program makes a trip abroad on Sunday – last week Wilfried went – on his own – to Cees Nooteboom on Menorca. Now the idea is that Palmen expresses her fascination for the French writer Marguerite Duras, standing at her home and at her grave – and did a bit à la Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and Rob Kemps with their favorite singers in Chansons!
Connie Palmen calls Duras fearless, she raves about her alcoholism, her immodesty, her intense loves, her suicidal loneliness and “devastated face”. Almost inevitably, the conversation then turns to Connie and her “wrinkly head,” her loves and her drinking that she said goodbye to when she took her old, ailing mother to the hospital by ambulance. I didn’t find out much more about Duras, waiting for the new translation of her most famous book l’Amantwith a foreword by… Connie Palmen, who overcame her fear of death on this occasion.
Less Diederik Gommers
Now I heard intensive care specialist Diederik Gommers say with my own ears that after two years of non-stop talking about Covid in talk shows, he was ready for a little “less Diederik Gommers on TV”. But apparently he couldn’t say no to a death drive through the Albanian Alps alongside a complete stranger at the wheel. The new season started on Sunday evening The most dangerous roads in the world.
It started in 2019 as a BNNVARA program, but the same media director (Gert-Jan Hox) who decided that Matthijs van Nieuwkerk could continue to earn above the Balkenende standard, took the travel program off the tube. Not because the viewing figures were disappointing, on the contrary, but because the program no longer matched the social course of the broadcaster.
Now Powned is broadcasting the program unchanged: two celebrities who don’t know each other get into the car, alternately being driver and co-driver. There are five billion kilometers of road in the world, but they drive on the narrowest mountain roads, with the most nauseating hairpin bends, along the scariest ridges and deepest precipices. Even if they gave me money, I wouldn’t participate in such a program, apart from the fact that I don’t have a driver’s license.
If you do get on a death ride with a stranger, then with an intensivist, presenter Emma Wortelboer must have thought. Together in an SUV through the ‘Cursed Mountains’ of Kosovo. They thought it was laughter, bouncing along slippery roads past cliffs and ravines. Emma Wortelboer drove like crazy, and Diederik Gommers actually did too.
Officially this is called a travel show, and indeed you get some information about the country and the inhabitants, but I would still call it a talk show. Sitting next to each other in the car, without eye contact, can lead to nice conversations. The strenuousness of one, the biggest mistake of the other. Drinking without handbrake on (both), having to say a lot of ‘sorry’ the next day. A 26-year-old presenter and a 56-year-old doctor appear to be quite similar.