Renze Klamer has given two very long interviews about the RTL Tonight debacle. It shows that he could return to the NPO and that he finds Beau and Humberto quite bland…
Last weekend we saw him walking past all the press on the red carpet of the Amsterdam Dinner – star allure, Johan Derksen calls it – but this weekend Renze Klamer is very much in the talking chair. More than two months before his comeback, he gives a major interview A.D and he is in the Telegraphpodcast by Pim Sedee.
Knot in stomach
What does it all boil down to in short? Renze already had doubts about the program prior to the start of RTL Tonight because he was too ‘absorbed in the format’, had little input and thought it was too glamorous. Once the show was running, he immediately felt ‘unhappy’ in the situation, because he could not express himself.
His own opinion was not appreciated by Peter van der Vorst, he had to keep it to himself and above all he had to comply with all the substantive choices made by flop editor-in-chief Carlo van Lienden. Soon he went to work with a knot in his stomach and decided it would be better for everyone if he quit.
The Sundays
Renze moved heaven and earth to get through to the then TV boss Peter van der Vorst, but that did not work. “Up until the moment I left, I tried to find a solution. My proposal was that I would make Sundays with more freedom in subject and guest choices,” he says in the AD.
Peter refused, who has since been kicked out. “There was a very firm belief in this formula at RTL. Anything that could jeopardize this was not approved.”
Cups of coffee
An option to return to the NPO was soon on the table, Renze said in the Telegraaf podcast. “We had a few cups of coffee once in a while. There was a kind of interwar period when I was away from RTL but it was still unclear what the course would be and how long they would continue with it…”
“I said, ‘We agree to disagree from both sides, we’ll sit it out for a while and see what happens’, but at some point I did think: what’s the decision? When I quit, I had accepted that that could be the end of it and they would tear up the contract. In that sense I had the luxury that other opportunities also presented themselves.”
Beau and Humberto
Peter van der Vorst is now out, his TV debacle RTL Tonight has stopped and now Renze is returning. And Beau van Erven Dorens and Humberto Tan were not happy with that, to say the least. They were especially hysterical about Renze’s joke on Instagram: “Let’s see if I can buy a table like that somewhere soon.”
Renze wrote this with a photo of his old talk show with a regular table, while RTL Tonight had a desk. “The context is that I was in a taxi in Guangzhou, in China, in a completely different time zone. I was just able to connect my phone to the internet and I started getting all these congratulatory messages. It was leaked a little earlier.”
Not so serious
Renze actually wrote this message very spontaneously, he says. “I thought: shit, I haven’t said or posted anything online for a long time, but I’m just very happy that I can start. I thought: what can I do? I’m not saying anything about Tonight, I’m just making a joke about something that has no feeling, namely a table, and I have to quickly post something.”
“Then I posted this and I even checked it with RTL, like: guys, is that okay? That was okay. I got all kinds of nice reactions in the beginning, but later it exploded in the other direction. It was from my enthusiasm, that joke about that table, because it is also a world in which we should not take ourselves too seriously, I think.”
Grain of salt
Beau and Humberto clearly take themselves very seriously, Renze wants to say. “You shouldn’t take yourself too seriously, you should be able to take things with a grain of salt and you should be able to have a joke. That’s how I try to be in the match. It’s just television, it’s just work, you shouldn’t make it too difficult.”
In the end he fell through. “I thought: well, fine, if that goes wrong… I then sent a text message to both Beau and Humberto: ‘Okay, guys, sorry about that timing, that may not have been convenient and I didn’t mean it in the wrong way.’ I haven’t received a response. I recently saw Humberto at the presenters’ breakfast.”
Hand shaken
There the gentlemen shook hands. And what about Beau? “I haven’t spoken to him yet, no. I texted him and didn’t get anything back, but that’s okay.”
Renze concludes: “I understand very well that it was not a nice message for them and not a nice perspective. That is very annoying, but at the same time: I have also been on that side of the coin. It is also part of the profession that that can happen, but of course it does not make it fun, no. I completely understand that.”