Aart Staartjes, the actor who has been playing the grumpy Mr Aart in the Dutch version of Sesame Street for over twenty years, is threatening to leave the show over a programming dispute. He said this last week on the Coen & Sander radio show (Dutch). The ire of Mr Aart was awakened when the starting time of the show was moved around a lot by the NPS public broadcaster. Originally, Sesamstraat started at 6:30 pm, later it was moved to 6 pm, then 5:30 pm, even later to 5 pm, and, starting today, finally back to 5:30 pm, writes sesamstraatnaarhalfzeven.nl (Dutch).
Last week, an emotional Staartjes suggested on De Wereld Draait Door (Dutch) that the network was trying to deliberately kill off the show, which saw a marked decline from 500,000 to 30,000 viewers: “What idiot came up with the idea to program a show at five in the afternoon when the target audience are parents and their young children? Nobody is home at that time. And when I try to find out who’s responsible, everybody’s pointing at someone else.”
Sesamstraat was first broadcast in the Netherlands in 1976, at a time when the country disallowed commercial networks and there were only two or three public channels. Staartjes (1938) joined the show in 1984. He is also well-known for having presented the reception of Sinterklaas for 18 years.
(Photo by Photocapy, some rights reserved.)
The Instituut Collectie Nederland, the agency that manages the national government’s art collection, is 
The elderly avoid tear-jerker television programmes such as Memories, Spoorloos (Lost without a trace, about finding lost family members), and Het Familiediner (The Family Dinner, about broken family relations), according to research by Margot van der Goot at the University of Nijmegen. She says these shows evoke emotions that the elderly typically try to avoid. Van der Goot will get her Ph.D. in two weeks based on a study on the viewing patterns of people older than 65, 
At the MIP fair in Cannes last week Dutch TV producer Endemol presented a TV format that pits co-workers against each other as they get to vote one another off a company’s payroll. This is about real companies, not just ones made up for the show, and real people with real jobs that feed children. The working title is Someone’s Gotta Go 
Lack of sponsors may cause the Vlaggetjesdag (Flag Day) festivities of Scheveningen to be cancelled this year, or to be shortened to an actual day, 
– “Officer, officer! You have to arrest my neighbour, Mr De Vries.”
Two scientists from Leiden University, Joke Bouwstra and Robert Rissman, invented a gel that has the same healing properties as “the buttery coating that protects and nurtures a foetus’s developing skin,” reports New Scientist. Apart from helping premature babies, the ‘baby butter’ could also be used for other applications. 