Jan Slagter does not believe that Margriet van der Linden has stopped the talk show M on her own initiative. He says he has heard otherwise. “It didn’t score well.”
Margriet van der Linden has disappeared from the tube quite silently after having muddled through for five seasons with her activist talk show M, the worst DWDD successor ever. Does Omroep MAX boss Jan Slagter think that’s right? “Well, ehh… What can I say. The viewer is always right.”
too woke
M was nothing, Jan thinks. “I mean, this program did well in the beginning and then it just went downhill. It was of course very difficult to replace Matthijs van Nieuwkerk. I mean: he had 1.2 or 1.3 million viewers every night. But when I looked at it I also had: yes, on this subject again!”
It was all ‘very woke’, Jan continues. “I didn’t always feel like I missed something if I didn’t see it.”
Heard things
Does Jan believe that Margriet will stop of her own accord? “She says, ‘I’m going to stop doing something else.’ Yes, I’ve heard other things too. Just that they pulled the plug, because the eve is very important for public broadcasters, but also for commercial broadcasters.”
M was disastrous for the eve of NPO 1. “The eve is the lead-in for all other programs. If you then have 500 or 600 thousand viewers, that’s not good.”
Unfortunately
He also sympathizes with Margriet. “It’s a shame for her. I understand it must be very sad. That team worked on it with a lot of love. It didn’t work out and that’s what happens with television. Then you also have to take your loss and say, ‘Thanks for watching, stop the show.’ As she has.”
In retrospect, Jan still finds it incomprehensible that De Vooravond has been taken off the tube. “Then De Vooravond wasn’t so bad. 700 or 800,000 people watched that.”
what the fuck
The Eve was not urgent enough, according to broadcaster BNNVARA. “It wasn’t ‘urgent’ enough. Yeah, what the fuck is urgent? Fidan gave a huge drive to that program and told her the opinion. I think that was what cost her her head. It wasn’t left enough. I am so sorry about that.”
“I thought it was a really good program. It has not been given the opportunity to grow. It was gone from one day to the next.”