It’s unbelievable: The Evening Show with Arjen Lubach, the country’s most important satirical news program, stops two and a half weeks before the House of Representatives elections. “Give him money.”
As a current program that takes itself seriously, you have to be on the channel in the run-up to the most important news event of the year: the House of Representatives elections. And yet the current season of De Avondshow with Arjen Lubach ends on November 10, two and a half weeks before people go to the polls on November 22.
Arjen starts raking
How is this possible? Media critic Victor Vlam has figured it out. “I immediately thought: a major programming blunder by the NPO,” he says in the podcast The Communicados. “It turns out to be something else and that is the fact that Arjen Lubach is starting a theater tour. On November 20, two days before the elections.”
This theater tour is necessary for Arjen to earn a solid celebrity salary, as he faces the salary ceiling of more than €200,000 at the public broadcaster. “I thought: why is he starting a theater tour? We can of course be very honest about that: that is of course also just making money.”
220 thousand euros
Due to the salary ceiling at the NPO, we are without Arjen Lubach in the run-up to the elections, says Victor. “I don’t necessarily blame him, but I think this is an effect of the top income standardization law. As a television star at the NPO you can earn a maximum of approximately 220 thousand euros.”
The effect of that maximum is that TV stars simply work fewer hours, he explains. “What do a lot of television stars do? They simply take more time off and, like Arjen Lubach, do other things in that free time. So they have not necessarily started earning less per hour than in the past.”
Starvation wages
Victor understands. “Arjen Lubach now indeed has a considerable amount of money left over from that theater tour and he earns 220,000 euros from the NPO. And I get that, I don’t criticize that, because you are mega popular. 220 thousand for a mega popular television star is, with all due respect, a pittance. A pittance.”
What?! Isn’t two hundred thousand euros a huge salary? “I earn less than that, but I think it’s a pittance for someone as popular as Arjen.”
‘Don’t talk about it’
According to Victor, Arjen quits two weeks before the elections because of his ‘low’ salary. “I do think that if we did not have that law on standardizing top incomes, we would not have had 19 weeks of Evening Show a year, then we might have had 38 and then it could indeed be seen during election time.”
Arjen arrives late The Telegraph knowing it’s not his decision. “We will be there for nine weeks in the autumn, so unfortunately we won’t be there a few weeks before it actually takes place. Yes, then you have to go to the bosses. I never see them. I’m not talking about it. I would have liked it, but it is no different.”