When Wim T. Schippers died in Amsterdam on 10 June 2026, at the age of 83, the Netherlands lost something it will struggle to explain to outsiders. He was a painter who covered a museum floor in peanut butter, a television maker who provoked questions in parliament, a radio host who talked over every record he played, and — to the generation that grew up after all of that — simply the voice of Ernie, Kermit the Frog and Count von Count in the Dutch Sesame Street. To call him a comedian, an artist, or a provocateur is to catch only one face of a man who spent six decades insisting, cheerfully and relentlessly, that none of it meant anything at all.
For non-Dutch readers, the easiest reach is toward Monty Python. The comparison is useful and misleading in roughly equal measure. Schippers worked at the same moment as the Pythons, shared their appetite for the absurd, and like them treated the conventions of broadcasting as material to be torn up on air. But where the Pythons built elaborate sketches with punchlines and internal logic, Schippers went the other way — toward deliberate pointlessness, dead air, anticlimax, and a kind of sweaty, shabby chaos that was entirely his own. Python was anarchy with a script. Schippers was anarchy with the script thrown out of the window, on purpose, while the camera kept rolling.
A Dadaist who wandered into television
Schippers was born in Groningen in 1942 and trained as a visual artist at the school that would become the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, though he never finished. His early instincts were rooted in Dada: art as provocation, as joke, as a question about whether “art” meant anything in the first place. In 1959, while still very young, he had his breakthrough when Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum bought his drawings.
His most notorious work captured the whole philosophy in one image: the Pindakaasvloer, the “Peanut Butter Floor” — a long, thick layer of peanut butter spread across a gallery floor. People stood in front of it and said, in tones he loved to imitate, “Oh — that’s what you call art?” That was rather the point. For Schippers, life was fundamentally meaningless, and art, being part of life, was therefore equally meaningless — which meant it could be anything, or nothing. It was a serious idea delivered as a running gag, and he never stopped telling it.
Hoepla, and a nation in uproar
In 1967 Schippers landed at the VPRO, the small, idiosyncratic public broadcaster that became his natural home. There he devised Hoepla, and almost immediately detonated a national scandal: the programme showed model Phil Bloom as the first nude woman on Dutch television. The reaction was enormous — outraged letters, VPRO members tearing up their memberships, debate reaching all the way to the Tweede Kamer, the Dutch parliament. The Netherlands of the late 1960s was modernising fast, and Schippers had found the exact nerve to press. He would spend the next decades pressing others.
The characters that a whole generation can still quote
The 1970s were Schippers’ golden age, and the era that lives most vividly in Dutch memory. Out of programmes like De Fred Haché Show and Van Oekels Discohoek came a small cast of grotesques who outgrew their shows and lodged permanently in the national imagination.
There was Barend Servet — played by IJf Blokker — a figure of seedy authority and absurd self-importance. And above all there was Sjef van Oekel, performed by Dolf Brouwers: a perpetually flustered, perspiring, slightly unwholesome master of ceremonies who never quite seemed to know what programme he was in, forever on the edge of disaster and dignity at the same time. Sjef van Oekel became the most famous character Schippers ever invented. Decades later, Dutch people of a certain age still recognise the name instantly, the way the British recognise a dead parrot or a silly walk.
What made these creations endure was not that they were lovable, exactly, but that they were true in some uncomfortable, hilarious way — figures of pomposity and incompetence and bodily awkwardness that felt unnervingly recognisable.
Ronflonflon: radio as glorious demolition
If television made him famous, radio made him legendary among connoisseurs. From 1984 to 1991, Schippers hosted Ronflonflon avec Jacques Plafond — Jacques Plafond being his own alter ego — first on Hilversum 3 and later Radio 3. The show ran for years and obeyed no rule of radio whatsoever.
Schippers, as Plafond, talked straight through the records. He filled the airwaves with rambling, nonsensical monologue, conducted against an imagined backdrop of a studio reduced to rubble, punctuated by indefinable noises — the squelches, the pops, the sounds of pooping and peeing and general bodily mischief that he deployed like a percussion section. Working closely with composer Clous van Mechelen, he turned the radio studio into a theatre of the absurd where the listener was never quite sure what was a joke, what was a mistake, and whether there was any difference. It remains one of the strangest things ever broadcast on Dutch national radio, and one of the most beloved.
The voice in every child’s living room
Here is the twist that makes Schippers genuinely impossible to summarise. The same man who scandalised parliament and demolished radio studios spent decades as one of the warmest presences in Dutch childhood. He was the Dutch voice of Ernie, of Kermit the Frog, and of Count von Count in Sesamstraat. A generation that knows nothing of peanut butter floors or Sjef van Oekel grew up with his voice in their living rooms every single day — proof that the great provocateur could, when he chose, be tender, silly and utterly disarming.
“Dying I find even greater nonsense”
Schippers stayed productive to the very end. In 2024 the Stichting Wim T. Schippers was founded to preserve and continue his work. In one of his last interviews he spoke about his final piece, titled Wim is weg — “Wim is gone” — which he kept refusing to finish, joking that completing it might mean he was about to die. It is to be presented at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on 1 July 2026, which would have been his 84th birthday.
He summed himself up best. Being born, he said, struck him as nonsense — but dying he found even greater nonsense. He was buried privately, which feels right: a man who turned his entire public life into a magnificent argument that nothing matters, slipping quietly out the back, leaving a country still laughing and not entirely sure why.
Jammer, maar helaas — a pity, but there it is. It was one of his own catchphrases.
He would have approved.
#vpro #wimtschippers #nonsense #
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