VPRO's Mondo is television as grown-ups deserve on channels other than NPO3.

Once you are an adult, i.e. over 30, you only want to be moderately disrupted. This is not a law of the Medes and Persians, but of Dutch Public Broadcasting. On television - and actually on the radio too - once you have brought children into the world and built a bit of a career, with a matching house to buy in a former vinex neighbourhood or otherwise, you want to be predictably entertained. Life is confusing enough as it is. That's why VPRO's Mondo is disappearing from Sunday evenings.

Much - but too little - has already been written about the madness of the NPO management's decision to scrap NPO's last arts programme before it has come of age. Morose old naggers who miss their book programme or squeaky-clean hour somehow have no edge with the people trying to keep public broadcasting alive in the Netherlands. Only a minority of potential viewers want to commit to arts and culture on TV.

Death warrant

And NPO already does so much: series, games with difficult words, drama productions with cabaret, something with Matthijs and so on. All culture. So why feel sorry for a programme like Mondo, which VPRO at first rather ambitiously bet on as something that could potentially go to the golden slot on the eve? Here, Nadia Moussaid, the once-dreamed-of successor to Matthijs van Nieuwkerk or Jinek, could warm up for the big time. That warm-up took a fat year and is now cut short because she did not win the Grand Prix. With her editorial.

Oddly enough, the programme has only really gained wings since the high ladies and gentlemen in Hilversum imposed the death sentence. This Sunday, the last Sunday of November, was a fine example of that. The curious combination of Adelheid Roosen and Maxim Februari, along with a rather bizarre guru woman who did something with pelvic floors: it was hilarious.

Adelheid

Whatever it was: a celebration of life and admiration, and in a way that for once was not bigoted, but pithy. That can be credited entirely to chief guest Adelheid Roosen. This is a woman you can probably hate intensely, but who I have taken to my heart since she once sailed into the now long-gone Café Belgica near Amsterdam's Leidseplein on her scooter to congratulate me on a nice story in some trade magazine.

Adelheid deserves its own programme like Mondo, along with Moussaid. That will be about little more than Adelheid, but who cares? DWDD was also mostly about Matthijs, but because that's a man it doesn't stand out. Adelheid and Nadia Moussaid: must be possible. Nadia has been giving such a wonderful caricature of a girl from the reformed province who has suddenly found herself in the wild world of big-city art every disruptive episode by now. Perfectly, from the first episode where she had to admit that Jan Wolkers was pretty fierce for someone of her background.

Barend Servetus

At the moment when all is lost, the most beautiful things emerge in most people. Beautiful poems will have been composed on the gangways of the Titanic. Mondo, from VPRO, ended this Sunday with a polonaise in which Adelheid and Maxim Februari, who had now finally gone out of his mind, did something reminiscent of Barend Servetus' embarrassing programmes of the 1970s.

This is television as grown-ups deserve on channels other than NPO3. Young people, the target group NPO is so keen to bring in, are primordially conventional. My tip to the bonzes in Het Gooi: forget them. Focus on the wandering forties and fifties, who yearn for disruption. This broadcast of VPRO's Mondo was unforgettable. Especially also because it contained a piece of modern dance by ICK, which made me cry intensely, so beautiful.

Watch it back on the public broadcaster's app.