Angela de Jong really hits it hard just before Christmas: she lashes out at the critically ill Tim den Besten. ‘The spoiled presenter’, she calls him in the headline of her column.
Christmas or not: she remains relentless. Just before the Christmas holidays, Angela de Jong goes all out on the critically ill Tim den Besten. The presenter is battling a rare form of cancer, but he can currently be seen on television in the program ‘100 days in the forgotten neighborhood’, together with his buddy Nicolaas Veul.
Soy latte
Angela looked at that for a moment and was shocked. According to her, those two are really not suitable for dating leveling with people in a deprived area. ‘Two hip VPRO boys’, she calls them. “Maybe it was a good idea on paper,” sneers the infamous opinion diva in her AD column.
You shouldn’t put these types of people among real people with real problems, says Angela. “Could they also see that there are bigger problems outside their own bubble than ‘are we going for an oat or soy latte today?’”
Debts
At one point we see Tim chatting with a gentleman who had a debt of three tons. After ten years, he is now down to just under a barrel. “Oh, so you’re almost there,” the presenter notes cheerfully.
Yes, if you are used to a generous NPO salary, then you are indeed almost there when there is ‘only’ a hundred thousand euros outstanding. The gentleman: “You have clearly never had debts.”
Tim reacts pissed off. “Well, you don’t know anything about that. I owed a ton of tax. Yes, I know what it’s like.”
Tim pissed
The gentleman looks at Tim’s team with laughter and disbelief. “I’m not there for nothing, of course. (…) This is a conversation that may just take a little more time to explain it properly so that you understand it. Having debts cannot be explained in simple terms.”
Well, Tim who still has to pay a tax of 100,000 euros because he has been eating like crazy is of course incomparable to the position of this gentleman.
Brat
Angela calls it ‘heart-wrenching TV’. “This program painfully exposes how big the gap really is between the Amsterdam canal belt and the rest of the country and between the TV vanguard and the raw, real life on the street.”
The man in debt makes it painfully clear what a spoiled brat Tim is, she thinks. “The look the man gave him left nothing to be desired in terms of clarity. You saw him thinking: you have another spoiled presenter. Bam, that was a nasty slap on the nose for Tim.”
47 seats
It is very good that the NPO makes television in neighborhoods such as Laak in The Hague, Angela concludes. “This is more useful to a viewer than talk shows in which self-proclaimed intellectuals wonder in surprise how it is possible that the PVV now has 47 seats. But please don’t ever send these two again. This will only widen the gap.”
Tim can put that in his pocket. With Christmas greetings from Angela.