If we are to believe the experts, these are tough TV times for Paul de Leeuw. In recent weeks, Internet authority Mediacourant has featured headlines such as ‘Hefty: 58 percent viewers zap away when Paul de Leeuw comes into the picture’, ‘Violent news for Paul de Leeuw: TV career abruptly ended’ and ‘Paul de Leeuw almost out of the top’. 25: ‘No longer on TV next season’.
For a lack of context, media-disaster tourists (I am not without sin too) could think that Paul de Leeuw’s TV pension was really a necessary evil. Would his program Van Coming Soon – now working on the second season – then finally be Waterloo as a presenter and TV maker? The program has fluctuated around 450 thousand viewers in recent weeks, while it is programmed between viewer numbers cannons Between Art and Kitsch and On 1† Could it have just been beautiful?
We can be brief about that: absolutely not. Van Coming Soon is De Leeuw’s best program in years. After years of walking through the desert of the TV landscape, De Leeuw is back in his natural habitat: having fun, serving people, and sometimes poking fun at them. The format of the program is delightfully simple: De Leeuw drives a bus through the country to fulfill wishes. Think of a boy from Boskoop who wants to go on the bus for a day. Or to two owners of an African snack bar in Dordrecht who hope for more customers. Or to a man who just wants to make a frikadel himself together with his best friend.
The wildcard of the program is ‘voice-over’ Hans Kesting, who constantly accompanies De Leeuw. De Leeuw and Kesting are good friends, and where that kind of clique formation could have turned out to be annoying in other programs, their chemistry gives Van Coming Soon a pleasant playfulness. We see this, for example, in their gossip with voice-changers, or when they’re dressed in hideous ABBA costumes. singing in front of an empty hall in a party center, because the owner of a delicatessen in Hattem is a big ABBA fan. De Leeuw and Kesting are like two cheerful little boys at those moments, who are allowed to enjoy themselves screaming with joy. It’s very infectious, especially because the ABBA fan next to them can be themselves for a while at the same time. Perhaps no TV history was made here, but we did see people who were just very happy for three minutes.
And so finds Van Coming Soon just the right balance between cozy nonsense and small-scale, heart-warming help. And no, it may not be revolutionary or high-profile; this is just a nice, cheerful program with its heart in the right place. Kesting, after an item in which De Leeuw unexpectedly reunited a mother and daughter: ‘Paul, that was what you call honest, wonderful and simply beautiful television.’ And so it was.