Completely against the zeitgeist, SBS6 puts four old white men on a plane to Asia. Better late than never turned out to be a top formula. In 2018, Olcay Gulsen went on a journey with four television legends, and in 2020 Katja Schuurman was the leading young woman and Estavana Polman has been approached for this third season. She is that top handball player and the girlfriend of former football player Rafael van der Vaart. So she goes on a journey and takes with her: Frits Barend (76), journalist; presenter Henny Huisman (72); Top pop presenter Ad Visser (76) and the oldest legend is Edwin Rutten (80), drummer, singer and Uncle Willem of course.
Those four have to keep it together for a few weeks on a trip through South Korea, Cambodia and Nepal. That didn’t go completely smoothly in the earlier seasons, I understood. Peter Faber (79) opened a book about this, in Story true, but I would like to believe it. He was in seasons 1 and 2 with the same group of men: Gerard Cox, Willibrord Frequin and Barrie Stevens. He won’t name names, but, he says, the late Willibrord could “bring things to a head.” A “little firing, so to speak.” Reportedly, there would have been a traveling mediator. I would like to have the pictures with that.
The camera from RTL Boulevard was there when the new batch of travelers departed from Schiphol this summer. The men boasted about the expensive travel insurance that John de Mol had had to take out especially for them and boasted that their wives would be better off financially if they not would come back. All four confessed that tears had been shed that morning when they said goodbye to their wives – Ad Visser and Melanie have been married 55 years, Henny and Lia 48.
It was clear that an extinct species was about to leave here when Henny Huisman told us that his wife had packed his suitcase. “She always does that, that is tradition and I do not want to interfere.” Edwin’s bag – also packed by his wife. Ad’s bag – ditto, and Frits had only put his rain jacket in the suitcase himself.
Generous with sleeping pills
There they went, on Wednesday night in the first episode. They pushed their luggage cart in front of them like a walker and then flew to Seoul in eleven hours. Business class it looks like, because people slept lying down. Henny Huisman had (himself) filled his pillboxes for the entire trip, and generously handed out sleeping pills.
Why is this fun to watch? Let me preface: I laughed. The scene in which the four report to the check-in desk of the hotel in a sleepy mood and Henny Huisman searches his entire body for his passport and laughs out of sheer panic, that was contagious. But one fit of laughter does not make a good program.
The men are sent across the Han River in kayaks. Frits and Ad – the slimmest two – are already floating in their boat, Edwin just barely capsizes and Henny gives in to his fear of the kayak and stays ashore. Then it’s Estavana who overcomes her fears as she climbs an 11-meter long, moving bridge between two towers. And then look at those men spryly running over those terrifying wobbly planks.
They also went through the city on e-scooters – with those helmets on their heads it looked incredibly clumsy. They had to work out in a kind of public park full of fitness machines. Perhaps this is the crux of this program. The men have nothing left to prove, they don’t care if they dare or not or how they come across. They are on a school trip and having the same fun as they did at least sixty years ago. We know, they know: “You will never experience this again.”