TV review “That too!” Also not fun in renewed form

Made done do not take times, but of course you can always try to bring a long-deceased TV program back to life. For example, we experienced the resurrection of on Sunday That too! (NPO1). That was a successful consumer program in the 1990s. A panel with the young comedian Sylvia Millecam, among others, played complaints from victims.

After 21 years, this program was again removed from Stal. Herman van der Zandt presents, in the panel, Jelka van Houten and Stefan de Walle, among others. They deal with complaints from a woman from Barneveld about the noise of her neighbor’s helicopter, complaints from a couple with a defective rental camper, and from a young family that no longer received a reception allowance when the father turned out to have a brain tumor. Reasoning tax authorities: he was still at home so he could take care of the children.

The format is that the comedians with crazy voices and fake accents replay the victims and their teasing spirits-without knowing what is real, and what was thought of. That really got in my way. I preferred to hear the real victims and bureaucratic villains. Much more interesting.

Since the glory days of the old Also that Reality has changed the television. We don’t want to play conflicts with scripted jokes, but real conflicts with real crazy people. But it can also just be me. When the program started in 1989, I already thought it was an approval program and I still think that is. It felt like I was watching a repetition from the nineties.

Handball

To flee the war in Yugoslavia, a youth handball team went from Mostar to the Pentecost tournament in Oosterblokker in 1992. A dangerous journey of about 2000 kilometers with a tragic undertone: the twenty -six girls thought they would be gone for two weeks, but the war made it months, years. That was a preconceived plan from their coach Josko Stanic, in consultation with their parents to bring the girl to safety. The handball tournament was an excuse.

As unwanted refugees, they were stuck in the West Frisian village, cut off from their parents family and friends. Yes, they were safe here, and their parents said they were better off in the Netherlands. But they felt lonely. And never completely at home. Gerben van ‘t Hek and Rens Lieman recorded this special story in the book The bus from Mostar (2022). Trauma psychologist IVA Bicanic and director Yvette Nieuwstad have now made a TV effect on it: The bus to Mostar (NPO2).

In this three -part series, four women from the handball team take the bus back home. Bicanic sees it as part of their processing. The girls have never really shared what the sudden fracture did with them, not even with each other. They can talk about that during the four -day return trip.

Zoom in

The canteen of the local handball club in Oosterblokker was their shared living room. The one that is getting better than the other. Half remained in the Netherlands. The images from a talk show from that time are painful, in which the childminders complain about the disobedience and thanklessness of the Yugoslavs. Bicanic said about this in the VPRO Guide: “Those girls had to say: thank you, thank you. While they thought on the inside: I want to go home, I don’t want to be here at all.”

They will never really come home. Their country no longer exists, their hometown has been destroyed and rebuilt, other people live there. And they themselves have become displaced, forever in that bus somewhere between Yugoslavia and West-Friesland.

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