“Why would you get up in the morning and not commit suicide?‘ A good question for a psychiatrist, and it was just one of the countless remarkable moments during the very last episode of *Zomergasten*, on 30 August 2026. Perhaps by not becoming a ”quarterly drinker‘ and sticking to a couple of light IPAs a day? For the sake of mental health? Jim van Os, a famous – and, to some, notorious – psychiatrist, ensured that this final episode will be talked about for a long time to come. He owes a great deal of that to his interviewee: Janine Abbring.
Her boyfriend, *Nieuwsuur* presenter Jeroen Wollaars, calls her ‘The Groningen Sliding Gate’, because she’s so good at shutting people out, even though she’s usually as open as can be. She admitted this quite early on in her conversation with Jim van Os, a psychiatrist with an intriguing demeanour. Slightly uncertain, but with a strong focus on his table companion, he seems to be struggling against the natural charm that appears to radiate from him.
Father
Freud, now widely disparaged as an interpreter of the human psyche, would surely have had some interesting things to say on the matter. For, as Jim explained, his father made full use of his charm. Something that was apparently common practice amongst gynaecologists in the 1970s. According to Jim, back then you became a gynaecologist so you could womanise. Or to plant a bit of seed here and there if things ‘didn’t materialise’ during standard infertility treatment.
Now that he has a half-brother and half-sister, he has little praise for his father, who coped with the trauma of his Indonesian past by being a ‘quarterly drinker’ – which meant that every three months he would transform from a sober doctor into a drunken alcoholic.
Talent
But enough about his father, and actually enough about Jim van Os too. Let’s talk about Janine. Because this latest episode was yet another showcase of her talent. It was in our 'Zomergasten' reviews I often heard about interviewers who were more concerned with their own performance than with the interview itself. These weren’t just men, such as Theo Maassen, but also a woman such as Griet Op de Beeck It failed right from the start: listening.
And so Janine really knows how to listen. She listens intently, with a face that speaks volumes, and very often conveys the surprise or wonder that you, as a viewer, also feel. That alone made the programme featuring the blessed orator Tommy Wieringa to get through it. Now in conversation with Jim van Os – a man who did his best not to come across as too know-it-all, but who was still full of jargon – Abbring did what a good interviewer should do: summarise what her interviewee was saying in plain language, and then ask follow-up questions.
Theatre
In interview coaching jargon, this is known as LSD: Listening, Summarising and Asking Follow-up Questions. When applied consistently, as on Abbring’s *Zomergasten*, it has a hallucinatory and mind-expanding effect. In doing so, she also makes it clear just how much of a loss the end of *Zomergasten* will be for national television. Of course, 250,000 viewers is a drop in the ocean for broadcasting executives, but even a small theatre would struggle to attract that many people in a whole year. Nothing to be ashamed of.
For almost forty years, on six Sunday evenings a year, part of the Netherlands would wind down. That tranquillity was disrupted for about 15 years because a certain social network wanted to be a ‘second screen’, but in the last few years that has become completely irrelevant again. We’ve chosen once again to simply listen and watch, rather than making a fuss after every quote. It’s much more enjoyable on the following Monday, with visitor figures for this modest website approaching those of the programme itself.
Little dog
Of course, the data centres of the big tech companies are full of podcasts and video casts where people have the most interesting conversations with one another – sometimes lasting far longer than the three hours we set aside for *Zomergasten* – but on the internet, you miss out on that sense of community. You listen on your own, whilst ignoring your dog and passers-by who wave as you take him for a walk.
We’re going to miss Janine and her little dog terribly.
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