TV review | Melting hearts and breaking ice in Winter full of love

Two mega hits at the end of the year, programmed opposite each other. Winter full of love at RTL4 it started five minutes earlier, so let’s start with that. Confusing situation, around the same time last week, eleven foreign B&B owners were already introduced. These are the possible candidates for the next season B&B full of love, last summer’s hit that still resonates three months after the last episode. In the summer of 2024, we will see eight of these eleven candidates dating for weeks.

Winter full of love is the winter variant. Five Dutch people in a wintery foreign country receive potential loves. They live and work in Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Norway. They are certainly not all B&B owners. Saul (29) is a real estate agent and manages 90 percent of the housing market in Riederalp and the surrounding area with two of his five brothers. Benjamin (26) is the manager of a cafeteria in Belalp, Switzerland, and Edith (51) is an apartment manager in Austria. They made the bunk beds in-house. The men in the coldest places offered their guests their own accommodation. Guido (43) first had to dig the road to the guesthouse at his wilderness camp in Lapland out of the snow. With temperatures around -35 degrees, the hut can hardly be heated and the poop box is a hundred meters away. Compared to this, the ’boutique hotel’ of widower Marco (55) in Norway is spacious.

All the intriguing ingredients of the summer original are now present again. Edith’s highly sensitive, aura-sensing fourteen-year-old son who helps his mother choose a suitable man from the video messages sent. The discomfort of two complete strangers suddenly sharing a house together, the difficult conversations at the table, the first cautious letdowns. And that lugging of kilos of suitcase, this time up the mountain and through the snow. Guest Amy Rose (20) seems to be planning to stay for weeks. The receiving party, real estate agent Saul, considers it a compliment “to him” that she has brought so much to look “groomed and nice”. Host Benjamin doesn’t panic when he sees the amount of luggage his guest has. Painter and firefighter Nicky just told him that he “used to want to sit on someone’s lip 24/7.” That will never go away.

Furthermore, the winter landscape lends itself to winter jokes. The ice is broken, hosts know their stuff, a lot disappears like snow in the sun, dates leave each other anything but cold, frozen hearts melt and even Amy Rose’s often used “chill” gets an extra charge in this environment. I wonder how chill she will be in the next episodes, because her Saul has also invited an ex-girlfriend to come stay.

Teflon Mark

The smartest person has traditionally been the blockbuster of the public broadcaster. Funny to see that one of the first candidates is a former participant B&B full of love this summer. Paul Visser (from B&B owner Debbie) was there on Monday, with actress Barbara Sloesen and former director Marco Louwerens of Talpa TV. The latter was charged at the time with calming the mood around the talk show Today Inside. “I was the Kofi Annan among the men of VI and the transmitter.” The VImen invariably called him “little director”. He didn’t find it insulting. “René van der Gijp also called Nelson Mandela that “nice African guy.” What is most striking about this episode: in the game part ‘Collective memory’, no one was able to mention more than his name during a fragment in which Prime Minister Rutte announced his departure. Apparently no one had an active memory of ‘fall cabinet’, ‘longest-serving prime minister’ and ‘Teflon Mark’.



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