Paul de Leeuw is back with Ranking the Stars, but it doesn’t seem to be as crude as it used to be. For example, he already thinks fat shaming is transgressive. “Afterwards I said: do you want to take that out?”
If anyone has made extremely crude jokes on television for years, it is Paul de Leeuw. One of his most spicy shows ever was Ranking the Stars and it now returns in a kind of cleaned-up version on RTL 4 – tonight is the first episode. It seems to be going pretty well, because Paul seems to be applying a lot of self-censorship.
Fat shaming
Many things are no longer possible, Paul says in front of the camera Show news. One of them is fat shaming. “I think we have all grown now. We all know that you don’t say everything about color, about bias. A comment was just made about weight and it was immediately dismissed. You don’t do that anymore.”
What happened then? “I also went to her and said: ‘Do you want it in? Do you want to take it out?’ She says: ‘No, leave it in because it shows what someone else thinks and how someone else reacts.’”
Fatty
According to Paul, it is not clear whether RTL will indeed cut this out. “I don’t know if it will last, but of course I’m also fat, so then you also have a fellow sufferer, but yes… It actually happens naturally. No hard nuts are cracked.”
Celebrity photographer William Rutten thinks that’s a shame, he says at the desk. “I thought it was the strength of the program that they blurted out everything.”
Be sweet
It seems like Paul is walking on eggshells a bit. Show expert Bart Ettekoven: “I can still see that boat coming towards me during RTL’s Pride in Amsterdam last August, with the text on it very large: ‘Start loving, stop hating, be sweet.’ They want to convey that as a channel group and this program obviously does not fit in with that at all.”
The strangest participant this year? Sébas Diekstra, says Bart. “As a victim advocate? I think it’s a daring choice. He must have thought about it carefully himself. I don’t think anything at all, but I think it is a daring choice.”