Touché

Touché is a measured interview series about the lives behind public work. It does not rush its guests toward a clean headline. Friedel Lesage tends to begin with something recognizable: a role, a book, a career turn, a birthday, a new creation. From there, the conversations move patiently into the material underneath. Katrien De Ruysscher speaks about Dr. Judith, long-running fiction, menopause, shame, and the value of a shared creative nest. Damya Laoui talks about cancer research, academic pressure, goals, budgets, family security, and the people who helped her become a scientist. Filip Arickx brings design into a more intimate register, speaking about luxurious sextoys, fashion, partnership, endings, and the refusal to treat a closed chapter as failure. Lisette Ma Neza connects poetry to family language, childhood reading, Kinyarwanda, Dutch, Rwanda, and the freedom she wants to believe in. Edward Boute turns a role at Google Cloud Belgium and Luxemburg into a conversation about happiness, corporate culture, and what a person should remove from a life. Alice Toen, speaking after turning 100, looks back with dry clarity on theater, work, cold rooms, cinema warmth, study, and persistence. Music runs through the show as more than decoration. Songs give guests a way to end on hope, freedom, memory, or play. The tone is warm without becoming sentimental. The questions leave space for pauses, corrections, and long answers. Touché suits listeners who want personality interviews with depth rather than speed. It is most interested in the point where a life story becomes a way of thinking about work, family, body, age, desire, loss, and courage.