It was not a warm welcome for RTL presenter Humberto Tan, on the NPO caravan of the first Summer guests this season. Podcast makers Marcel van Roosmalen and Gijs Groenteman had in Another day complained that Tans Summer guests would mean the bankruptcy of the intellectual cucumber time marathon, and on social media Tan was also considered by many to be too light, smooth, yes actually just too RTL. Tan had also reached that sputter, yes, but you couldn’t tell from him, because he doesn’t want that for them.
Straighten your back and see what you can do yourself, hung on an imaginary banner above Tan (56) and Summer guestshost Janine Abbring. An attitude to life that he inherited from his socially committed, single mother, Hilly Axwijk. In the first excerpt from From region to region we saw Hilly walking through the Bijlmermeer, and briefly address a boy in the street in which you could see the young Humberto: ‘You can learn something from that, can’t you?’ Hilly asked, ‘You’re not stupid, are you?’ We heard that the fragment had been submitted by the editors – in line with previous years, Tan also did not choose a barrage of funny films, but fragments in the service of his life story and vision.
To that lukewarm welcome we came back to a fragment from the Polygon journal from 1975, in which we saw how Surinamese who came to live in the Netherlands after independence were ‘welcomed’: as guests who were barred from the crowded cities. So it became the Bijlmer, a neighborhood that created low expectations to which Tan did not adapt: he attended grammar school and played chess. That aroused surprise at a friend’s house: ‘In my eyes you are only someone from the Bijlmer, so you can never be anything’, that’s how it felt, said Tan, and that’s how the surprise about his Summer guests. “You, why you?” It hadn’t harmed young Tan, he assured Abbring, but it can be difficult for young people who are less fortunate.
That is why Tan has spoken out more often in recent years against racism and inequality, for example as a member of the Mijnals committee, which provides the KNVB and the national government with solicited and unsolicited advice about inequality. ‘At best it sounds noncommittal’, Abbring thought. “I believe in: steady drop hollows the stone,” Tan said, a motto he keeps dropping. “You can do it in a very activist way and you can do it in a calm way.”
That’s strategy, according to an excerpt about late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Bader Ginsburg fought for women’s rights in America through a case in which a man was disadvantaged: the jury could empathize with that. “It’s very smart if you know who to talk to,” Tan said. Not to upset anyone, but to empathize with your audience to make progress: Tan’s plan, also on Sunday evening, towards the often white Dutch viewer.
It resulted in a well-considered and fascinating, but also safe positive program: Tan does not easily say anything that you can object to, only points out obvious abuses (such as racist chants against football player Mendes Moreira), carefully substantiates and chooses major social themes as racism, inequality and nature conservation. Out on a glaze-destroying fragment America’s Got Talent after then. But that story, about a deaf girl who could of course sing anyway, is also about persevering despite being behind.
Tan joins Robin van Persie, who is in the podcast High Performance his 13-year-old soccer-playing son reproached him for “loser mentality” when he complained that he had lost: “You blame him, blame her, but I don’t hear anything about yourself. Winners take the reins.’ Bridge to Tan’s canceled talk show RTL Late Night: he had to blame himself for that too. “You don’t make television alone, I don’t have to explain that to you,” Abbring said. Tan is hard on herself, which sparked a tendency in Abbring to always stick up for her guest – she’s a little too eager to walk away from every conversation when friends. Abbring also encountered the strategy: those who give circumstances (such as inequality) a greater role, those who point outward, end up in the vulnerable position of underdog, and there would rather be no winner.
Showman Tan knew exactly what he did and didn’t want to show. ‘TV is information, inspiration, but it is also entertainment.’ He showed a phenomenal tap dance fragment of the Nicholas Brothers, and what he learned on TikTok. “You often see a lot of… subjects I didn’t necessarily learn in school,” Tan said cautiously, hinting at the gaps in history books about black culture. A clip about wolves capable of changing rivers, a so-called trophic cascade, became a plea for nuance, because nothing is black and white, Tan said, not with the wolves and nowhere, and you can’t argue with that either. .
Tan concluded with fragments in honor of his brother Patrice, who died of AIDS in 1992. “That was the first time in my life that I had to deal with heartache.” A cure came just too late. Abbring tried to steer the conversation into a vale of tears: “Do you think it might be helpful for you to remember more things?” She hit a smooth stone.
Still, in a way it was a perfect RTL evening on the NPO, with information, inspiration and entertainment. With society, sports and games, American sentiment and an unhealthy winner’s focus. Anyone who wanted to saw that unyielding winner, another a Humberto who harnessed himself in the winning mentality so as not to make anyone angry. If you the Summer guests of Humberto Tan as a match between him and the haters, the victory was for Tan, although he would obediently say that it doesn’t have to be black and white.