The competition was cutthroat, but after the ’25 Years of Canvas’ quiz hijacksTeam Side Effects now also the prize for Goorste Anecdote from a Quarterof a Century of Value Searches has been unanimously decided, with warmcompliments from the entire jury. That year’s supply of hand soap is coming toyou guys!
JONAS GEIRNAERT “One day of shooting for ‘De Landing’, the second seasonWWII episode of ‘Neveneffects’, we were so bored between takes that we startedasking each other hypothetical questions along the lines of : ‘Would you dothis or that for that much money?’ It wasn’t long before Jelle ( TheBeule ed.) was tired of the hypothetical phase: Lieven ( Scheire ,ed.) would go shit in the woods, and if the amount we had left for it was highenough, Jelle would hold the still warm turd in his hands for five seconds.I’m really ashamed to have to tell you this now, but with the help of the crewwe managed to put no less than 270 rock hard euros on the table, on top ofwhich a nice amount would be added if Jelle squeezed the turd . So yes: nosooner said than done: Jelle did his thing and sprinted retching to thetoilet, a nice pocket money richer, while we were rolling on the floor withstomach ache from laughing. That’s actually weird – we’ve told that anecdote afew times already, and usually we’re stared at: “Do you really think that’sfunny?” Well, yes (laughs).»
HUMO To give the conversation a somewhat decent twist: do you look back on’Neveneffects’ with satisfaction, thirteen years after the last episode?
GEIRNAERT “Yes, although not all episodes of the first season were equallygood.
“What surprises me most of all in retrospect is that we were ever allowed tomake that series at all. We were four nobody’s who knocked on the door ofWoestijnvis at random, and were immediately allowed to make a twenty-minutepilot program for Canvas. That became ‘The source of the E40’, at least thebasis of what later became an entire episode. When they saw that, they said,”Okay, make a sequence.” Something like that wouldn’t work today, certainlynot because we knew absolutely nothing about scenarios or story techniques,and did everything on gut feeling. On a tight budget, too: for the firstseason we used cheap costumes from a rental shop, and pieces of styrofoam inthe swimming pool were supposed to represent ice floes at the North Pole_(laughs)_. But I do have fond memories of it, just like the much moreexpensive but also much more consistent second season. That time we startedasking each other hypothetical questions between takes, for example! No do notbother. That anecdote is perhaps too rancid to print in Humo.”
Watch the trailer of ‘The source of the E40’ here:
The most assertive crack: Jan Bosmans
Canvas crackImage vrt
Ask ten fans of ‘The Canvascrack’ (you can recognize them by their graytemples and their thoughtful way of talking) which crack they have the mostvivid memories of, and chances are that nine times out of ten the answer willbe John Bosmans reads. The most assertive of all cracks – we quote fromWikipedia with great pleasure – ‘not only regularly explained how things were,he also corrected a question a few times when he thought it was not quiteright’.
JAN BOSMANS “Wikipedia is right (laughs).
»A few years after my participation in ‘De Canvascrack’ I participated in’Blokken’, where I was asked whether a herring is a freshwater or a saltwaterfish. ‘Both,’ I said, but since that was supposedly not the correct answer, Iexplained that herrings are a broad group of fish, which also includes twaitshad and shad, for example. And they do swim up the river during the matingseason. Then the originator of the questions, Chris Soret the herringquestion was very rightly taken out of the competition.”
HUMO To put it simply: it was written in the stars that you would one daybecome a super crack.
BOSMANS “I didn’t give myself much of a chance, though, because I don’tknow a damn about popular culture and I’ve never been a hobby quizzer. Whatdid work in my favor was that ‘The Canvascrack’ worked with multiple-choicequestions: in 2006 I was already 51 and it became more difficult to come upwith answers spontaneously. Moreover, at a few crucial moments I reaped thebenefits of my classical training: by simply thinking about Latin or Greek, Isometimes found the solution that someone else couldn’t find.”
HUMO An example?
BOSMANS “I remember the moment I became crack: that was against a crackwho had already won seven tables, Leen Clinckspoor she was called, after aquestion from Herman Van Molle about what people used to think caused theflu. The first possibility was ‘a punishment from God’, the second ‘theinfluence of celestial bodies’ and the third ‘bad air’. I reasoned as follows:influence in Latin is influentia and in Italian influenza, the scientific namefor flu. So I answer: “The influence of celestial bodies.” To which LeenClinckspoor said: ‘No, I think it’s bad air.’ The die was cast: I becamecrack, and then I managed to bring in twenty tables and was declared a supercrack. It may sound cheesy, but all in all I didn’t find it that difficult.”
HUMO ‘De Canvascrack’ ceased to exist in 2014. Have you found what you arelooking for on TV since then, in terms of hard quizzes?
BOSMANS «No, there are actually no more TV quizzes in which ordinarypeople – and therefore not those moronic BVs with their sexist jokes thatplague the screen today – can score with their general development. I regretthat, and I fervently hope that the pendulum swings the other way. But willthat happen in the foreseeable future? I may have been a super crack once, butunfortunately I cannot answer that question.”