“I’m going to leave with a really bad feeling. Look what a beautiful club! You’ll never see this again.’ Greetje Bosma (the one from reality series Urk! ) had to swallow her tears when she just couldn’t manage to knock over a few cans with a chime of tennis balls around her waist. What remained was the elimination.
If you’ve lost me for a while, you’re forgiven. But in the universe of The all-rounder VIPs this is all completely normal. The game program is a special version of the SBS 6 program the all-rounder, in which a hundred ordinary Dutch people carry out all kinds of assignments in order to take a shot at the title ‘all-rounder’. From 2021, a VIP edition also followed, in which the concept of celebrities was given a completely new meaning. Now, celebrities inflation has been skyrocketing for years, but we have now reached a point where anyone who once happened to pass a TV camera could pass for a ‘Vip’.
That is also necessary, because the first season once started with 35 participants, and the program already has 68 (!) Dutch celebrities in the third season. You should think of genuine guns such as presenter Maya Eksteen, TV vet Piet Hellemans, TikTok joke-tapper Maaike van Houten, the mother of Roy Donders, the sister of Roy Donders, the sister of Olcay Gulsen, the son of Marco Borsato and the ex-girlfriend of Marco Borsato’s son.
The program started as a kind of guessing game, in which you could estimate whether or not the editors had made up these people. But it soon became clear during the assignments that something big was indeed going on here. The participants had to solve, among other things, a Bert-en-Ernie puzzle (35 pieces) and try to put a roll of tape in a lunch box. The highlight was the assignment in which the participants had to thaw a frozen swimming trunks with their body heat (unfortunately, the well-known TV hotelier Meneer Reimers couldn’t manage it.)
As a trained TV viewer, you often wonder whether there is something of a lower limit, or whether we have been in a sinkhole from which we can never escape. But watch for five minutes at forgotten VIPs who have to get sheets of paper from toilet rolls as quickly as possible, and all self-reflection about your viewing habits disappears on its own. It is not for nothing that the kick-off of the third season last week was immediately the fourth most watched TV program of Saturday evening. That’s not crazy, because The all-rounder VIPs is in fact a friendly branch of Squid Gamebut then with innocent games and voice-over Frank Lammers who shouts ’till never again’ after an elimination (nobody knows whether the VIPs have ever been heard from again after that).
In a preview we saw that the VIPs have to deflate a plastic flamingo next week. Looking away is no longer an option. Every country gets the Saturday night entertainment it deserves.