Five days after her death, Clairy Polak posed another question Tuesday night in the second round of The smartest person. The final week. In it, the best players of the past season compete against each other and the last remaining player can call himself the 22nd smartest person in the Netherlands on Friday. For the ‘open door’ questions, candidate and writer Renée Kapitein chose a question posed by Clairy Polak. Journalist and radio producer, she passed away last week. The smartest human episodes were recorded in May and June, the questions as early as March and April. She still seemed to be doing well there.
As an introduction to her question, Polak said that she had visited Eus’ book club. I looked it up, she was there on March 17th this year, the season finale. Very nice, she said, but „if you want to get teenagers to read, of course you shouldn’t invite me. Then you better call this gentleman”. And then came her question: “What do you know about Flemming?”. Renée Kapitein knew little about that, say nothing. What I knew about Renée Kapitein was that she had already had eight episodes of Smartest Person, and that everyone was getting excited about how she was there every episode. In her chair. Cross-legged, with one leg curled under him, sometimes with two, People thought outrageous. With her shoes on the chair. That was indecent, too relaxed, or unhygienic. She narrowly survived the episode. She’s back tonight.
Constant supply of shockdocs
The announcement of Ewout: (RTL5) I saw passing by on Monday evening, during dinner. Ewout Genemans single-handedly provides a constant supply of shockdocs on television. After the colon after Ewout in the program title it says: Dutch men are looking for Thai brides. Or: the rats are taking over the city. Tuesday night’s episode read: dead bodies examined. Plus a warning that the program contained shocking images. I experienced that myself on Monday.
Ewout started quietly, in the department of Amsterdam UMC where prepared bodies are kept for research by medical students or surgeons. The camera zooms in on the boxes and crates of body parts. Baking ‘unprepared arms’, ‘neck/head’ and ‘foot/knee’. Here the imagination is put to work, because filming how a dissection works is not allowed. Professor of anatomy Roelof-Jan Oostra says that every student has a ‘living moment’, but that the fascination for a body usually wins out over the natural aversion to death.
My ‘renting moment’, that’s what Ewout is working towards. He visits the Arista scientific cemetery, a field next to the hospital. There are ten bodies buried there of people who made themselves available to science after their death. Here, research is being done into humane decomposition – how does a body decompose when it is placed in the earth without a coffin. And above all, how fast will it go? The police would also like to know that, only in series do researchers know exactly how long the body has been there to the hour.
There is little to see on the field, except for more exuberant grass growth on the spot where a body has been lying the longest. Furthermore, everything interesting happens underground. That way you don’t make shocking images of course, so on to Texas, to the body farm, an open field where 60 to 70 bodies decompose above ground – a Texas State University research project. Standing among the dead, Ewout talks about the flies and maggots he sees. Just let a fresh body arrive, the donor died the day before. The man, naked, is lifted from the hearse and placed next to the other bodies. I saw that part on Monday.