The one who can do everything (pt2)

Hello, and welcome to part two of a special series on SATA. 

This series will be discussing Dutch series De Alleskunner and its derivatives. It will be in many (5? -- we’ll find out together) parts to be released over the next few months.

PART 2: WHY I THINK DE ALLESKUNNER IS REALLY GOOD

The first joke of De Alleskunner is the games. It’s a joke about gameshows. As an occasional game designer, I love games that are playful, that are funny, that have an unexpected edge. Let me explain:

- The premise of De Alleskunner is to find one winner from 100 candidates. De Alleskunner means “the allrounder” – literally “the one who can do everything”. Like any Battle Royale, almost everyone will lose. The winner, however, will be so impressive – the one person who can do it all, the one person does the best out of 100. And to get this winner, we’re going to run 99 games, the most possible, and so eliminate the cast one-by-one. This will make DA the best test of all-round skill, the best gameshow there can be. 

- In Season 1 of DA there WERE games that you would put on your list of all-rounder-ness. There was climbing, running, general knowledge, driving, paintball, hammering in a nail. But of course, that’s not 100 things, and there’s no point testing similar skills again and again: that's boring. So many of the games – most, in fact – were strange little “silly” things. 

- To give just one example – there’s a game in season 4 of re-threading a drawstring into a pair of jogging shorts. That’s an infuriatingly difficult task – so fiddly in fact, that if I were faced with it in real life, I’d probably just abandon the trousers. Having to do it is tedious. But having to do it on De Alleskunner!? Suddenly you’re thinking: is it better to get a leader thread in with a needle? Is it better to scrunch up the trousers, to go bit-by-bit, or try to do a lot at once? 

To the player, to the fan, there’s this puzzle – there’s an important decision. And yet to the new, casual viewer, it’s a competition to thread a drawstring – how ridiculous! Playing with this edge, creating this space where over-analysis and surrealism can mingle, is the magic of DA’s games. 

- As the seasons have gone by, DA has understood more and more how to hit that sweet spot. 

 

The second joke of De Alleskunner follows close behind: It’s cheap. Like the first, this is a consequence of the premise: We have 100 players and (spoiler alert) we’ve blown most of the budget on accommodation for them, and on the venue and crew for such a long shoot. So the set, the décor, the props, all have to be unnaturally, awkwardly cheap. 

The tables are the cheap, flippy-out kind you see in an exam hall. S1 is set in a factory, S2 in a hangar – both are sparsely decorated with a few “De Alleskunner” signs sticky-taped to the preexisting pillars in the building. The crew – both film crew and logistical crew – are often seen in the back of shot.

This vaguely industrial, vaguely film verité feeling is maintained throughout. The disembodied voice addresses contestants through an on-screen loudspeaker. Vox-pops are filmed with <whatever> going on in the background. Important details are sometimes only seen in the back of a wide shot, and a red circle has to be added in post (a bit like Total Wipeout but not). Very often, the game is played in a line, with the contestants awkwardly close to each other. People’s name-tags fall off. Props break.

These factors create a sense of unpretentiousness. De Alleskunner isn’t laughing at itself – it’s laughing at those who dare to pretend that television is swish, shiny and expensive. That things always work and the perfect shot is always there. 

Probably the third joke of De Alleskunner is an obvious one: the prideful fall. 

This one isn’t original – it’s the same joke that has kept The Apprentice in business for 15 years. But regardless, it is reliable humour to see a bunch of people line up in the start-of-series montage, declare themselves the best at absolutely everything, and then (with 99% reliability) get spectacularly proven wrong. And failure usually really does require you to be quite notably bad at something – with so many players, there’s a lot of margin for error before you’re gone. There will be a lot of people who are quite bad at each game who aren’t eliminated.

There’s a certain wholesome flavour to this joke resulting from the surreal nature of the games. “Ha, you thought you could do everything, but you were in fact rubbish at deflating an air mattress” isn’t exactly the character assassination you might see Alan Sugar or Anne Robinson dishing out. Although often snarky (we’ll revisit that momentarily), everyone who leaves De Alleskunner leaves on a definitive beat, on their own legs, and being applauded by their 99 new friends. 

 

The fourth joke of De Alleskunner is… the jokes. The disembodied voice is snarky – the catchphrases are “jullie zijn met 94 - maar niet voor lang meer” -- “there are 94 of you – but not for much longer” and to the departing loser: “tot noit meer!” – effectively “see you never!”, and these turn up over and over.

Most contestants are also dismissed with a jibe at the nature of their failure: “Bob, step by step it became clear that you aren’t De Alleskunner - tot noit meer!” to the loser of a game about balancing on a step. You get the idea. The voice itself is a parody of a “PA voice”, overly nasal and bouncy

This provides some lightness, but also some concession (and connection) to the audience, who might be feeling a bit distant from proceedings. The goading serves a reminder that this is sport, this is for your entertainment – not just some televised holiday camp. The constant use of catchphrases helps ease the audience through a very repetitive cycle of admin as each contestant is dismissed and the next game is announced.

In addition to these four jokes, De Alleskunner is a great, fun, rollercoaster ride. It goes up and down, from silly, light and fun, to moments of intense pressure, vulnerability, fear and failure. 

The players of DA care about surviving every single round – and most of the rounds are structured to find, challenge, spotlight those who are the weakest in that particular area. (I’ll revisit this point in a future post). 

I said this in part one but it bears repeating - losing doesn't just mean Not Being Able To Do Everything And So Not Being De Alleskunner, losing means leaving a crazy fun experience, the chance to play 90 more exciting new games, and saying goodbye to your newfound friends. (And, if you care about it, being mocked and shamed on national TV.) This stuff matters.  

Consequently, when you watch DA, you are watching -- every few minutes – fully grown adults flail, grasp, struggle, and despair. That’s drama! Real drama, real stress, anguish and disappointment.  

And now we’re on to another section of VO and another game. This one’s about stacking toilet paper!

High and low. Light and dark. Happy and funny and scary and sad. This is why I love De Alleskunner

To be continued…

The one who can do everything (pt1)

Hello, and welcome to a special series on SATA. No, SATA is not back – SATA never went away. I reserve the right to write here whenever and however I want.

This series will be discussing Dutch series De Alleskunner and its derivatives. It will be in many (5? -- we’ll find out together) parts to be released over the next few months.

PART 1: DE ALLESKUNNER

Let me start by talking about De Alleskunner, a show I absolutely love.

De Alleskunner is a Dutch Gameshow where 100 players play 99 games, to whittle them down to one.

De Alleskunner itself is a spin-off from “Homo Universalis”, a segment on a Belgian magazine show (which, yes, they played out in 99 segments over 99 days) with the same concept. Think like how In for a Penny spun off from Saturday Night Takeaway.

De Alleskunner is filmed in an abandoned paper factory (season1) or the autotron (seasons2-5). (Aside: I have never figured out what the autotron is. Is it car museum, that they somehow clear all the exhibits from? Or is it an airplane hangar? Or something else called that for historical reasons? Please write in.)

I first found out about DA in 2020, from Nick Gates aka BothersBar. We’re both big fans of two other Dutch gameshows: Wie Is De Mol and De Slimste Mens, (among many other old and foreign gameshows), and some clips from DA Season 1 were going around on Youtube. From the clips and a few translated articles, I got a nice sense of what the show was, but didn’t think about it any more. Later that summer, bored during COVID, I forked out for a VPN and started watching all sorts of foreign shows that I had not been able to before. (Ok, mainly Fort Boyard. In a way, all of what follows is a consequence of them deciding to geo-block Fort Boyard, so butterfly-effect that.) 

I chugged through season 1 of DA over a couple of weeks as an after-dinner treat. I was using the Dutch channel’s online player and I was able to get a browser extension to translate the subtitles, so I could actually follow what was happening. I remember discovering ‘the magic’ of DA over those weeks: the onslaught of challenge after challenge, the highs and lows of survival and elimination, and the way that in 100 faces, certain people started to stand out – the natural heroes and champions of the competition.

I also (checks notes) enjoyed that they used Extreme Ways in the soundtrack. 

In September that year, the company I worked for at the time (who were lovely, fun people who were always up for a challenge) were looking for some fun events we could do to keep people happy (remember, we are still right in the middle of lockdown here). I invented, pitched, and ran, “the 95% challenge”. 

The 95% challenge was a multi-week event for about 60 players (around half of them went the distance) – each week they were sent “homework” of 12 games – each game took less than 5 minutes and had some objective criteria which allowed me to rank all entries. The top 95% in each game would score one point. Anyone who completed all 48 games in the top 95% (I think around 7 of the 60 did so) won extra special kudos. Of course, this was De Alleskunner in all-but name, although I think my changes made it work better in the circumstances.

About a year later, smash hit Squid Game came out on Netflix. I really enjoyed that show (it was gamey, foreign, and genuinely gripping), and I remember a certain cultural mania just after where everything was being compared to Squid Game. I remember thinking that with its warehouse style, player “uniforms”, sneery disembodied voice, array of wacky games from ordinary objects, and emotional highs and lows, DA was “the closest thing” to a real Squid Game that had ever been done. I even started writing a SATA post on the topic, but (fortunately?) it is lost to history. I did however, find this discord message:

 

 

Now, jump forward over two years, to some time in 2024. A rumour went around that we were getting a show called 99-to-beat, which was the rough translation of “99 - wer schlägt alle?”, which is the name of the German adaption of De Alleskunner. Again I need to thank BothersBar who both provided the rumour and the connection (via the German show) to DA. Because a few years had passed, the Dutch channel (SBS6) had uploaded seasons two and four to youtube, where they are still viewable. There were also a lot of clips of other versions around, especially the German version. I got interested in the show again, and watched season 2, which opened with a 90-second compilation set to thesong Legends Never Die by Against the Current. This 90s clip is awesome, if you do nothing else for me, go watch it now.

I mention this because that song then lodged itself so deeply in my subconscious that MONTHS later, when I heard it randomly somewhere else, I was suddenly reminded of DA.

Anyway, I watched season 2, and I also wrote this comment (which Nick then republished with my permission) on discord because people were totally confused by the rumoured format of the show:

 

You’ll notice that my comments there are not 100% positive! I had some doubts about how well DA would translate to Britain, and to ITV. We’ll return to that discussion in a future part…

Then come the summer, the applications open for ITV’s 99-to-beat. Reminded of the show, and with suddenly a lot of free time on my hands, I also get around to watching season 4 of DA, “just for fun”.

I do think at this point I was the British person (aside from probably some of the people who were working on producing 99TB!) with the most knowledge of De Alleskunner.

To be continued…