Pieter Omtzigt is on his way back from a burnout and, in his own words, has a ‘limited capacity’. Viewers at WNL Op Zondag were shown what happens when there is too much load, in which anchor Rick Nieman deftly switched from the cozy seating areas to a previously recorded ‘live interview’ with Pieter Omtzigt, in which Pieter Omtzigt walked away after Rick Nieman asked about his ‘ behaviour’: crying fits, shouting and running away.
The conversation between Pieter and Rick was on an estate in Twente. The gentlemen sat on chairs directly opposite each other. It looked very unnatural without a table, I had to dig for a long time until I could remember such an uncomfortable situation. Once at a Vitesse press conference with then trainer Peter Bosz.
Afterwards, Rick said live in WNL Op Zondag that they never actually do that at WNL Op Zondag, an interview on location, but that it was the plan in advance to include it integrally in the live broadcast so that the viewer still gets a got a live impression. The viewer was then shown that Pieter Omtzigt walked away during the conversation. Not unique: Rick remembered from the rich history of WNL Op Zondag the time an actress had to go to the toilet live. “We showed that then. Television is television.” Note to self: watch WNL Op Zondag more often, spectacular things happen there.
Rick Nieman is too much of a journalist not to start talking about the unstable behavior of Pieter Omtzigt, the stories about it are spilling over the skirting boards in The Hague. You don’t even have to be an importer to know about it, no one actually notices it anymore. The journalist Rick tried very hard to smell smoke, he sniffed emphatically through his nostrils, after which it quickly became too hot under Pieter’s feet. As a viewer you knew: where there is smoke there is fire, but was it enough to call for the fire brigade? The first messages appeared on the internet. NRC and NOS wrote about ‘an emotional Pieter Omtzigt’. A.D, VillaMedia and it Dutch Dagblad were talking about ‘an irritated Pieter Omtzigt’ and The Telegraph talked about a Pieter Omtzigt who ‘shot full’. Best headline according to this one-man jury: RTL News with: ‘Pieter Omtzigt upset after question about emotional moods’.
‘Upset’ is somewhere between ’emotional’ and ‘irritated’, but it can of course also be both. In the live part of WNL Op Zondag, Rick Nieman said that Pieter Omtzigt was not happy that the interview had just been broadcast semi-live in its entirety. “And that is an understatement.”
So upset again.
By the way, walking away after a question about whether it is true that you have ever walked away in a conversation is an excellent answer.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes a column on Mondays and Thursdays.