The strangest thing I have experienced behind the scenes in TV

One of the nicest things about working ‘on TV’ is that you end up in special places and situations you could never have imagined. It’s about really beautiful moments, bizarre locations, but also very strange little things. Those details that you would almost forget, but they are just so specifically strange that it’s impossible to erase the image from your mind. If you ask me what the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced during my work on TV shows is, we have to go back to the corona period. Not that it’s a time we all necessarily have warm feelings about. But at that moment, I was working for ‘All You Need Is Love’, and with that program, we were able to do special things during a time when many people needed a little extra love.

When we first heard about the coronavirus, we had already been on TV every weekend for a few weeks. As always, we were busy making people happy with little things like love declarations or by bringing loved ones from abroad to the Netherlands. Every week, our studio was filled with about 350 people in the audience, but among them, there are always people who dream of being surprised but still don’t quite dare to hope that it will really be their turn. Like every Saturday, we had been busy all day preparing in the studio. The audience was already in the lobby, waiting to be let into the studio, when an extra news bulletin was announced. With the entire studio crew, about 50 people in total, we turned on the screens in the studio, where we normally enjoy the most beautiful videos of people falling into each other's arms. Now we saw Mark Rutte, in a gloomy state, telling us that we could no longer be in a room with more than 100 people. Not only did the message make a big impression, but the whole setting of seeing this on the big screen, with so many colleagues around you, and hearing those words through the huge speakers in the studio, it was an extremely strange experience.

Then the calculations began: our crew alone consisted of 50 people, and there were still 350 people waiting outside the studio doors. Our show had to go on, after all, we had so many surprises ready behind the scenes! But that also meant we had to send 300 people home. And here was the big problem. We couldn’t just say: ‘the 50 people at the front by the door can stay’, because that would mean we would most likely accidentally send away the majority of the people we were supposed to surprise. The editorial team had to go into battle mode. Based on the photos that were sent along with the letters, they walked through the waiting audience, picking out 50 people who could come in. Of course, this had to be casual and inconspicuous, because if the participants realized they were going to be surprised, the broadcast would still fail. Participants, their family or friends, and a few lucky ones who just came for fun to the recording, were eventually allowed in while the majority of the people went home disappointed. And there we sat, in a half-empty studio. At that time, we had no idea that this was just the beginning of many more corona measures that we would have to navigate in the most difficult ways.