Jan Slagter, the boss of Omroep MAX, was literally sick of the media riot about the ‘fire’ of Özcan Akyol on TV. “It was literally bile that I spewed,” said the broadcaster.
It was unique: Jan Slagter decided to fire Özcan Akyol as presenter of Sterren op het Doek via TV last summer. He did this after the presenter appeared in Zomergatsen and where, according to critics, he showed not an ounce of remorse about his role in the Matthijs van Nieuwkerk-gate. “This man doesn’t make any sense to me!”
‘Really sick of it!’
Jan regrets this a lot afterwards. “I shouldn’t have handled the whole Eus story like that,” he says in the Panorama. “I told Shownieuws that our collaboration ended, but I should have said that directly to him. I was really sick of that.”
He continues: “I remember being in the office and suddenly feeling very nauseous. I literally felt like spewing bile. I had never experienced that before.”
Damage
He thought the worst thing was that the AD, Eus’s newspaper, then opened the attack on him. Why did it affect him so much? “Because people tried to damage me based on something that was not true. The front page of the AD said: ‘Unrest at MAX.’ None of that was true. My integrity was compromised and I did not see that coming.”
He continues: “In the meantime, I kept feeling nauseous, terribly. It came back when I drove back from Hilversum to my house in Scheveningen. I stopped at a parking bay near the Indian Monument, just past Madurodam. All yellow bile. There was a small car where an older lady got out and came to me.”
‘Ah, boy’
What did that older lady say? Jan: “She said: ‘Oh boy, oh boy, don’t worry, I’ll get you a tissue.’ She grabbed a tissue and held me as I continued to throw up. If I just hear that sound from someone else, I’ll throw up too and I’ll be gone.”
“But she was so sweet and said: ‘You know, when I see you, I always think of my dear father, because our parents went to the same church on the Vrederustlaan in The Hague: ‘I asked her name, it turned out that her name was Mrs. Van der Burgh, I drove home, came home and the vomiting was over. Whatever you think, I call her my guardian angel.”
Dear woman
Jan later thanked the guardian angel. “I said in a broadcast of Goedemorgen Nederland and De Kist that I would like to meet that lady, then I received a message from her daughter and then on a Saturday afternoon I went to Mrs Van der Burgh with a large bouquet of flowers.”
“Such a sweet woman. It makes me happy that a complete stranger comes to help you when you are having a hard time. And not because I am Jan Slagter, because her daughter told me that she has always helped people. That was the whole story.”
