Twan Huys announced the first guest of the new College Tour season as the man behind the “great Voice of Holland scoop”. And so you immediately understood why it was wise that after his Boos broadcast on January 20 – watched by 10 million people – program maker Tim Hofman kept a low profile and did not give a damn about interview requests from TV colleagues. He foresaw that it would mainly be about him, and not about women who had been hurt. After three months of television silence, the time was apparently right to talk about Tim Hofman, so Tim climbed on Twan’s stage.
Tim is at ease in pop venue Paard in The Hague, where the broadcast was recorded with 400 student audiences. He used to play there with his band, and even then it was noticed that talking between songs was much better than singing. On a big screen, his mother says in a pre-recorded interview that she gave him his first guitar, because she hoped music would be a way out of Tim’s anger, sadness and stubbornness. He became rebellious after he was kicked head-on by a motorist when he was fourteen – Twan Huys points to the scar across Tim’s forehead. From the windshield. Sleeve up, a 12 inch gash in his left upper arm. “It almost fell off.”
Music did not bring salvation, neither did studying – three studies at three universities, one subject passed. He tells, not for the first time, about the hypochondria he developed, the constant fear of suffering a terrible disease. “I’ve had all the cancers.” A fair question from a student from the audience: How handy is it to Over my dead body present, in which he follows young people with a terminal condition? That’s fine, he says. Although it was hard to swallow when candidate Jeroen, the same age as him, with whom he also became close friends, discovered his brain tumor through tinnitus, ringing in the ears. “So did I.” twan. “And then? Have a scan made immediately?” No, says Tim. “I called my mother.”
red button
Tim Hofman has been named the most influential person in the media this year. He translates this as: “I pull a string and further along something starts to move”. But it’s no longer as fun boyishly cheeky as it once started, because we also hear him talk about a red button on his bag, a code word that he has to say in case of danger, and a police helicopter that immediately flies above the roof. hangs. A red button that “rogue” Tim Hofman often presses is that of columnist Marcel van Roosmalen. He diagnosed him in his program Media Inside with a messiah complex. Comedian Marc-Marie Huijbrechts calls it a Jesus complex. A student from the hall has another variant, he asks whether Tim Hofman sometimes feels like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders. “No, man,” Hoffman responds quickly. to which heself carepackage” shares: to the gym to “pump dumb biceps”, on to the hairdresser, then to the psychologist.
Whoever sat in the hairdresser’s chair this weekend and said something there that she might have been better off saving for the psychologist (or the police), was singer Ellen ten Damme. Özcan Aycol asks her in The cut guest whether she will also share MeToo stories, just like other female artists. She hesitates, keeps it vague, says she’s working on it. The judicial way is the only way, she says, not that of television. But then the words The Voice and abuse of power have already fallen, and everyone apparently knows exactly who they just didn’t want to publicly ‘pillage’. And so Tim’s “24-karat scoop” (Twan’s words) still reverberates after months.