He was a phenomenal elocutionist – and Erik Engerd

It is well known that Bredero once fell through the ice with his sled near the village of Halfweg when he was on his way back to his hometown of Amsterdam after a funeral in Haarlem. But Joost Prinsen would not have been Joost Prinsen if he had not asked his company a quiz question about the anecdote. “Who had the poet just visited in Haarlem?” And then, with visible pleasure, I give the lack of answer: “The painter Frans Hals!”

It was that love for trivia in the fields of literature, sports, politics and culture that formed the basis for With the knife on the tablethe successful TV quiz that he devised with his good friend Jan Kok and presented for years from the start in 1997. Surrounded by a team of confidants, Prinsen displayed all his qualities: his general development, humor, singing talentcharm and phenomenal delivery. “Everything came together there,” he said about the popular program. “I was the knife.”

Thorough preparation preceded the recordings. He often came up with the quiz questions himself and tried them out on his wife Emma. Once in the studio, it came down to his intuition and the team’s collective TV experience. He was intensely satisfied with Kok’s suggestion to ensure that a very unsympathetic candidate would win. “Jan said: ‘Then people think: what an annoying man. And they will watch it again next time to see how he loses.’” Years later, Prinsen could still laugh at the memory. “Because that’s exactly what happened!”

Every TV detail of the program had to be correct. “I hated people who said, ‘Well, it’s on there’. It shouldn’t be on it. It had to be fantastic.”

Prinsen (83), who died of cancer and a cerebral infarction, was involved in everything during the recordings. A trait he got from his mother, he said, excusing it. He says he got the gene for unbridled ambition from his father. In everything he did intensively during his career – theater, bridge, singing, TV and writing columns – he considered himself “a sub-topper”. To add with a laugh: “But they also sometimes win the stage to Alpe d’Huez.”

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Star in declamation

Joseph Jules Thomas Prinsen (1942) grew up in a Catholic Brabant family. His mother took care of the six children and ran the household, his father Claudius was mayor of Roosendaal and later of Breda during the war. When little Prinsen is nine years old, his older brother Dirk picks him up from school. His announcement is too big to comprehend immediately: their father has died. Uncles and aunts take care of the family. Uncle Sjuul takes Prinsen to PSV. The boy would have a lifelong love for the club from Eindhoven.

The young Prinsen turns out to be a stage talent and a star at declaiming: reciting poems from memory. He enters competitions and wins, which earns him his first additional income. Such as in Den Bosch, where he completes the municipal grammar school with much delay. “The first prize could be awarded again to Joost Prinsen without hesitation,” writes a local reporter in 1963.

His performance skills lead him to the theater school in Amsterdam, where he was taught by Ton Lutz. The acclaimed actor is like a father figure to Prinsen, who is open to Lutz’s lessons: “You don’t play a role, Joost. You play a scene.”

He ended up in the musical via Wim Sonneveld The little truth. It won’t be a success. Prinsen feels deeply unhappy and afterwards calls his own performance “substandard”. He had a soft spot for Sonneveld himself, after the comedian showed himself willing to help one of his employees get some money by testifying about a collision without being present. Prinsen: “A charming swindler.”

Chess cafe

It was a category of people whose stories he enjoyed, preferably in the night bars of the city. “You see a lot of failed figures there,” he said. “I find that interesting, also to play.” In the chess café on Leidseplein, an older man who taught him the Sicilian opening variant once said irritated: “Do you want to learn something?”

A statement that he often thought about decades later as a teacher at the Kleinkunstacademie in Amsterdam. “The man in the chess café was right: I was not open to learning from him. I sometimes saw that with students: I can say something now, but it is not the right time.”

He considered teaching to be his best role. He worked with the country’s greatest talents such as Paul de Munnik, Remko Vrijdag and Wende Snijders. He acknowledged that he had significantly less talent for dealing with what he considered less talented students. “Then I thought of a student: oh God, not him. Of course, as a teacher you are not allowed to radiate that, but I did.”

Vain colleagues

His long career was characterized by a wide variety of roles and extended from stage to TV series and from radio plays to musicals. He always tried to be in the company of the very best. “We succeeded,” he said looking back in 2020 NRC. Prinsen was made with Wieteke van Dort and Aart Staartjes legendary children’s television of The Stratemakeropzeeshowin which he achieved great fame as Erik Engerd.

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For, among other things, the TV program Klokhuis he collaborated with composer Harry Banninklanguage virtuoso Willem Wilmink and his colleagues Loes Luca and Hans Kesting. “With them I felt like I was in heaven.” For years, his characteristic voice formed the familiar intro to the radio program he loved Plastic.

Prinsen lived in ‘Bredero’s’ Halfweg with his wife Emma Wildeman, to whom he had been married for almost fifty years when she passed away in early 2020. Together they adopted two children.

The marriage was intense, their eldest daughter Ireen said at her mother’s funeral. “You supported each other through thick and thin,” she said. “With arguments as the cement of the marriage. The better throw-and-throw work too. An espresso machine, laptop, you name it.” Prinsen himself always put that into perspective. “We only had a fuss about silly things. I found that very reassuring.” He wrote the book about the death of his wife (“I kissed the ground where she walked”) After Emma. He later found a new love in journalist Noraly Beyer.

The tall Prinsen had an unprecedented work ethic and loved his work intensely. Until his death, he continued to be amazed by vain colleagues without self-mockery and was irritated by populist politicians. Yet he did not pretend to know it all better himself. And for this too he had a suitable explanation ready, taken from his favorite writer Nescio: “Life, thank God, has taught me almost nothing.”

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