Linda makes Sunday night
Addicted to Five Live
Long, quite a long time ago, Sunday evenings were at their best because Gooische Vrouwen was broadcast. I still remember that I had just given birth to my oldest and felt a deep sense of jealousy when I heard my beloved and my mother watching the climax of Gooische Vrouwen from my maternity room. It was still in the era before Uitzending Gemist, you know.
A lot has been said about Linda de Mol in recent months, but little to nothing about what she is good at or, in my opinion, excels at. Linda is simply a baroness of the screen. Take Miljoenenjacht: not my program at all (I find game shows a bit of a waste of my time), but with the ease and empathy with which Linda presents it, I am completely in it. Where I doubt whether Winston will actually eat that cake with the people to whom he just handed a check (I always have the feeling that he will tear back to the Gooi as fast as he can with flames in the pipe), I have the impression that Linda will chat with her candidates for a long time.
But then Five Live, because I was ready for that. Okay, Twitter may not have been enthusiastic and perhaps it was a bit easy to portray Angela de Jong as the TV variant of the voodoo doll, but I enjoyed it with a capital G.
In any case, Linda has a fixed group of top actors swarming around her: Daan Schuurmans, Lies Visschedijk, Waldemar Torenstra, Carolien Spoor, and Abbey Hoes. The only one I miss is Tjitske, but who knows, she might be able to entice her for the next season.
Five Live shows, with a pinch of salt, how things go behind the scenes of a talk show. The shuffling and arranging of guests (great portrayal by Carolien Spoor), the rituals in makeup, the secrets between the makeup artist and the presenter, the single final editor (we called them TV widows) who keeps walking around with back pain because her chiropractor works on Fridays, which just happens to be the day of the broadcast, so yes, then just take painkillers. And meanwhile fantasizing about the producer (delightfully portrayed by Daan Schuurmans). The smuggled bottle of Pinot Grigio for Sarah, the host, the bordering on disinterest nonchalance of the other presenter (also her ex with whom she shares their villa) and Sarah's repeatedly mentioned anniversary of five years without sex. Also a delightful scene: the wobbly intern brings the host a penicillin course which she then downs with a glass of wine. While the intern stammers that she should be careful with alcohol and the pills, the host replies that it's a myth stemming from World War I, with such a firm ease that only a true alcoholic can pull off.
The ending was somewhat abruptly gruesome and I don't know if that wig of ‘Angela de Jong’ was intentionally stuck on so clumsily (I suspect it was), but I will be ready again next week. And the viewing figures (more than 700,000) were such that even their own producer Flip would spend the whole day satisfied with his feet on the desk.
Image: Screenshot teaser Five Live
