How on earth was the green light given to ‘The invasion of Belgium’?

Alex MazereeuwNovember 29, 202214:24

Sometimes you think you’ve seen it all. That it couldn’t get any crazier in terms of infantile TV formats. Yet someone at the public broadcaster decided that it would be a nice idea to broadcast a program in which one country invades another. What the hell was in the water when the green light was given to The invasion of Belgium (NPO 3, PowNed), will probably always remain a mystery.

The idea of ​​the program is that ten reasonably well-known Dutch people ‘invade’ Belgium to ‘take back’ the country. The Dutch celebrities must ‘bring an entire people to their knees without bloodshed’ and ‘invade the neighboring country silently and without soldiers’. It was time to ‘make things right’.

In practice, this mainly comes down to nice and playful assignments. The celebrities have to declare war live on the radio, replace Belgian beer in a supermarket with Dutch beer, or plant a flag on Belgian territory. But, and that’s where it gets really exciting: there are also famous Flemish people who track them down and hunt them down. Everything is led by ‘The Colonel’, an invisible client who directs his ‘soldiers’ from a distance.

Simon Zijlemans (left) and Tess Milne in the bushes in the program ‘The invasion of Belgium’.

Among the participants we recognize two boys from the Streetlab clan, presenters Tess Milne and Simon Zijlemans, former footballer Anouk Hoogendijk and rapper Gers Pardoel. Let’s hope they were at least generously compensated – although the program will have been less difficult for them than for the viewer, who has to watch Milne and Zijlemans run through the bushes for 45 minutes, and how the Streetlab boys joke about Belgians. tapping in a bar. You don’t expect it, but that turns out to be no problem in practice. In the opening episode, the voice-over wonders what exactly happens when you take on a ‘cross-border challenge’ with ten people.

Well, nothing at all.

Of course you could speak of an unfortunate timed format. Perhaps it was yet another provocation from PowNed to see how far they can go in needlessly scattering public banknotes. Perhaps the person with ultimate responsibility thought this was a simple YouTube vlog, and not a program that was broadcast primetime on NPO 3. More realistic, and especially more worrying, is that people actually saw potential in this format, and thought it would be really nice to Gers Pardoel running through Belgium to commit a fake invasion.

There’s nothing wrong with some aimless entertainment from time to time. But to make us look at an adventure program that is a failed, dead boring and totally soulless mix of programs like The hunting season and Hunted is the other extreme. Maybe it’s time for the Belgians to just annex us. Then we will at least be freed from this kind of infantile television.

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