It turned out to be Super Saturday this weekend, the first Saturday of a new year and a new TV season. A record number of programs started again, or for the first time. I counted 8. New programs like Cook yours with Yvon Jaspers who will cook with people who have to get their groceries from the food bank every week. Their circumstances may be harsh and angry, but Yvon’s tone is as cheerful and optimistic as ever – you have to be able to cope with that.
Also many new episodes of old acquaintances. Knowledge quiz I do not knowwhere you can still keep up with some general knowledge, and the ratings stunner with 3 million viewers: Who is the mole? This is season 23, I would be surprised if I managed to watch the denouement this time and more or less understand it.
With all the news on Saturday I wanted to talk about the old thing on Sunday, namely about Bassie & Adriaan: a treasure of memories. The documentary hit theaters at the end of 2023, this was the TV premiere. The title seemed to have been plucked from the old Bassie & Adriaan box. B&A and the secret of the treasure map, B&A and the mysterious assignment, B&A and the disappeared TROS star. And all those programs were probably more exciting than this documentary, broadcast by AVROTROS, the broadcaster that broadcast all Bassie & Adriaan episodes between 1978 and 1996. Perhaps that should have suggested that it would not be a real documentary, but a collection of compilations, retrospectives and conversations with the brothers Aad and Bas van Toorn themselves, plus with admirers such as Paul de Leeuw, Gert Verhulst and Mart Hoogkamer, the singer who released a remake of the B&A song ‘In Spain’ in 2023.
Such a shame. And certainly not because I was or am such a fan of clown Bassie and acrobat Adriaan. But if you’ve been on television for so long that you’ve taught three generations of children how to cross the road (“Look left, look right, and again”) and coined expressions like “No matter what happens, always keep smiling” and “That’s If I look inside my eyes’ then you are just as much of a household name as, say, The Fat and the Thin or Koot and Bie. That justifies a real portrait, not a trumpet of praise. I don’t want eighty-year-old Adriaan van Toorn who says to the camera in the last second: ‘I love you, brother’. His brother is now almost 88 and is confined to a wheelchair due to illnesses and disabilities. What I want to know is why the brothers who had an international acrobat act as The Crocksons for 25 years and performed together almost as one body, why they argue about corona vaccinations in the last years of their lives. Anti-vaxer Bas no longer wanted to visit vaxer Aad because he would be contagious. I’ll have to read that in the magazines again. Also that it is a piece of cake again by the way. What contributed to the reconciliation was the introduction of a Bassie & Adriaan game. Because the brothers’ shop is still open, with its own YouTube channel and soon a reissue of Adriaan’s autobiography, Tired, I can do a somersault! Brother Bas has his own autobiography, Allmemaggies!
This week I saw Hans Klok talk about the Van Toorn brothers on a talk show, don’t ask me which one. It was about the acrobat act that made them world famous. Something with a table, a chair on top of it, another one and another one and on top of that the brothers. “Very dangerous,” said Klok. Such an act should never be allowed again. I would also have liked to hear Joop van den Ende about the duo. He was at the start of their career and convinced them to start their own circus in 1980. “The biggest mistake ever,” Bassie wants to say in the documentary. Brother Aad soothes him. “What happened happened.” Exactly, and what, we would have liked to know.