Marcel and Gijs: Reviewing the Sixth Episode with Caroline van der Plas

‘A striking and passionate politician’, Prime Minister Mark Rutte reminded the late Silvio Berlusconi. The death of the Italian rogue politician, who died on Monday – he now rattles his money bag to appease Peter at the gates of heaven – aroused emotions on Italian television. We saw a presenter in tears, her colleague stammering. No, then Marcel van Roosmalen about Rutte’s praise: ‘Striking and authentic, that was Stalin too.’

Nice as talk show host Van Roosmalen in Marcel and Gijs diametrically opposed to the treasury (Vladimir Putin: ‘A great friend’) with which bungabunga-Berlusconi is pushed beyond the Styx. As the same steel-faced talk show host aptly criticized his guest, BBB forewoman Caroline van der Plas, with the compliment that she succeeded in elevating the troubles of the farmers, ‘a very small group of Dutch people’, to ‘a national problem’ .

It was the sixth Marcel and Gijs. The self-proclaimed ‘sniffing trainees’ Van Roosmalen and Gijs Groenteman of BNNVara replaced at the commercial SBS6 for a month Football Inside. Don’t expect too much, is the implicit message of their pretend humility, we’re just trying something. On Monday that was: a bit of old talk with the cheerful René Froger – did I hear correctly that he receives 15,000 euros for a twenty-minute performance? And interviewing the farmers’ patroness Van der Plas about the finally presented cabinet plans with the nitrogen plague.

The two did not make it difficult for her. Van der Plas repeated the mantra with which she always visits the talk shows: ‘something’ has to be done, but the nitrogen is not that bad. And she contradicted the assumption that nobody expressed that because of the billions in support from the cabinet ‘the farmers will all become millionaires’. For the rest, she sensibly surrendered to the summer-foolish irony that in Marcel and Gijs reigns supreme.

At the end of the show, Van Roosmalen took the BBB politician to graze by quoting from his own Total 2, the bundle he shamelessly advertises every day. He described Van der Plas as a politician who ‘talks right through the facts’. She listened to it with a laugh, and praised him, a little deadly, with: ‘Very good column.’

Immediately after this I zapped to a woman, where VVD Minister Christianne van der Wal of Nature and Nitrogen was interviewed. Eva Jinek asked whether, given the seriousness of the matter, she did not regret that she still carried on as ‘savagely attractive’, with which she wanted to win over the farmers for her plans in 2022. The minister avoided the question: ‘I’m a bit of a flapper.’ Jinek was sharp as she often is. She did not faze the minister, but she continued to give the politician a commendable trouble. Quoting from Van Roosmalen’s own work looked pale in comparison.