Normally I don’t mind much when I go to A house full look. In this sixteenth season of this KRO-NCRV reality program, large families are followed – families with a minimum of six children are eligible to participate. Excellent television to relax with, it is probably not just that the program is repeated late in the evening. The toil, the transport hassle, the put-to-bed chaos, the fourteen loaves of bread that go through in a week – you will find your own life bearable.
But on Thursday evening a thought suddenly overtook me. What if a Jelle is born in such a full house? From an early age, Jelle Bakker was above average interested in lights, sounds and rolling things. He is now approaching his forties and is world famous for the marble runs he invents and builds. He owes his fame to his YouTube channel Jelle’s marble runs (1.36 million followers). With his younger brother Dion he makes films of marble races for this purpose. At its peak, the marble channel received 164 million views, especially Americans are fans of its Olympic marble games: sand races with marbles, long jump, funnel sprints, triathlons.
In Jelle: world famous with marbles (Thursday at Powned) lets creator Kim Smeekes speak to Jelle, his brother Dion and his parents Piet and Ansje. At home, in his parental home in Wervershoof, Jelle, then 38, is packing his bag for a short vacation to a swimming paradise in Poland with the longest and largest slides. He adores slides, also a kind of marble runs of course, and the marble is himself. He packs his “primary” orange swimming trunks and a dark blue spare, a pack of Snelle Jelle gingerbread, goes into the side pocket of his backpack.
Meanwhile, his parents leaf through the photo album of his youth. Jelle in the box, fascinated looking at the lights above him. On all subsequent pages, Jelle poses next to his self-built marble runs, which were increasingly larger, more complicated and more ingenious. Crafted with Lego train tracks, vacuum cleaner hoses, drainpipes, bicycle bells. The entire shed was emptied, his father says. He had and was given all the space for it. With only one little brother under him who didn’t leave his side, that was also possible, I think.
Jelle’s parents already had such a suspicion and when he was four, they knew for sure: he is autistic. He cried a lot, says his mother. “Even at night.” He asked for attention 24 hours a day, says his father. And by the time he was eight, his parents were too exhausted to give him that. He came to live in a medical children’s home. Even then, television producers were interested in his love of marbles. We see images from an interview with him, he will be about twelve years old, in which he says that he does not feel anything about his autism and predicts that he will always remain ‘that way’.
RainMan
The images of Jelle living at home with his parents are reminiscent of the documentaries about the autistic Kees Momma and his aging parents in All the best for Keith and Keith flies out. Jelle, who sets up a marble empire with his brother Dion, evokes associations with the film RainMan, where the successful brother exploits the memory and computing power of his brother with autism. The spicy thing is that in this story there is only one hijacker on the marble track, and that is John de Mol. After a brainstorm with Jelle and Dion, he had the television format Marble Mania already broadcasted on television and sold to twenty countries before the deal was completed with the brothers. Marbles, says Jelle in the documentary, are a kind of little people with a soul and thoughts. Therefore, he treats them with extreme caution. He does. The fourth season of Marble Mania will begin in 2024.