Angela de Jong opens in the country’s most watched talk show, Today Inside, the attack on the great leader of RTL 4: Peter van der Vorst. “Is he still the right man in the right place?”
RTL 4 has recently been plagued by an increasing number of viewing figure flops and increasing criticism of the long broadcast duration of all programmes. During the corona period, the channel decided to go back from two programs to one long program of one and a half hours in prime time. The pandemic is now behind us, but those cost savings have never been reversed.
Angela attacks Peter
Due to the long broadcast time, the viewer drops out of programs that were successful in the past and new attempts such as Marieke Elsinga’s Alles is Muziek and Leco van Zadelhoff’s The Interior Project VIPS are megaflops. “What does this say about Peter van der Vorst?” Wilfred Genee wonders in his talk show Inside today.
Angela de Jong, one of the most influential people in the media world, said bluntly: “I’m starting to seriously wonder whether that’s the right man in the right place for RTL.”
Wilfred: “So, those are texts. Peter is watching now, isn’t he? He’s taking notes.”
Angela: “Yes, she will not be very impressed.”
The men at the table seem to think otherwise. “Well… Well…”, it sounds in unison.
Hugely disappointed
Angela is extremely disappointed in Peter. “I always thought when he came: he is a fairly normal boy, still has a young child, his brother was a truck driver I believe and his father and mother just live in Brabant, so it is not someone who is playing records at the age of fifty at a festival, like its predecessor.”
She is referring to Erland Galjaard, Wendy van Dijk’s husband. Wilfred: “Ha ha. You’re not much of an Erland fan, are you?”
Angela: “No, his focus was no longer on RTL at all, but on other things and with him you thought: he understands the RTL viewer. But yeah…”
‘The viewer doesn’t want this!’
Johan Derksen thinks that Peter may have lost the connection with the viewers. “That’s the art of commercial TV: you have to be able to sit in the viewer’s chair. With that girl’s show you insult the viewer.”
Angela: “When you make a program with Leco van Zadelhoff about re-styling a room, you have to think of the people sitting at home on a collapsed IKEA sofa. And don’t start talking about a chair in a corner that is an ‘amazingly beautiful object’, that you really must have according to the designer and that costs so many thousand euros. That is not the RTL viewer.”
Too much Edson
Johan also finds this incomprehensible. “Who calls this group? nobodies to redecorate the room?”
Angela: “And then again Edson da Graça who presents it, of which I think: he really does everything at the moment.”
Wilfred also agrees: “Yes, he suddenly has to do everything there, right?”