Albert Verlinde takes Leonie ter Braak seriously. Although the two have worked together, he is not impressed by her at all. “I think she’s a bit characterless actually.”
It is someone who initially seemed to be a great TV talent, but who absolutely did not live up to it: Leonie ter Braak. “Since her switch to RTL, one flop continues to follow the other. So far, Leonie’s switch to RTL has proven to be one big flop,” says AD presenter Robbyn Jansen in the program Spot Op. Wow, a painful announcement.
Characterless
Studio guest Albert Verlinde then starts verbally attacking Leonie. Is it the presenter’s fault or is she just unlucky with her programmes? “It’s a combination, but it’s actually her fault that it doesn’t work out, because she doesn’t know who she is. I actually find her a bit characterless: who is Leonie ter Braak?”
“Is that the woman who plays really good roles in films, is that the talk show presenter we met at WNL or is it hot air, as we saw in the balloon show? Don’t know.”
Disarming
Leonie is quite a nice woman in herself, according to Albert. “You can laugh a lot with her, she is fun and she has a disarming personality. She can have a very bad sense of humor, but somehow she still can’t make the audience love her and I think that is a really big problem. That has to do with character.”
“If you say to RTL at such a balloon show: ‘Yes, sorry, I just won’t do it’, then you have character, you dare to stand for something, but now it becomes a bit spineless.”
Too early
Actually, Leonie would have been better off staying at SBS, according to Albert. “I think she left SBS too early. She was with HLF8, she wanted to do talk shows and at SBS a kind of euphoria suddenly arose with De Oranjezomer, De Oranjezondag, Vrijdag Inside and suddenly it became a talk show channel.”
“She could have been part of that. She just left too soon. After Hélène Hendriks, she was the other great talent at SBS. You see what happened to Hélène and Leonie is not having that at the moment.”
‘Get to work!’
Leonie must also try harder, Albert decides. “It will only work out if you work very hard. What disturbed me about What A Day is that after three weeks she was still reading the rules from a card.”
“Then I think: hey, Marie, get to work now!”