Arjen Lubach thinks it is highly inappropriate that the Meilandjes use a life on welfare to turn it into TV entertainment. “Playing that slob is just bullsh*t,” says the television star.
The Frogertjes, Geer en Goor and the Roelvinkjes already preceded them and now it is the turn of the Meilandjes: they will live on social assistance for a month to make a nice TV program out of it. The girl’s problem? The zeitgeist has changed quite a bit and laughing at poverty is wringing more and more viewers.
“Now it’s over!”
Arjen Lubach therefore focused on their new program Chateau Bijstand yesterday in his Evening Show section ‘And now it’s over’. “And today there are no TV shows where people with a lot of money pretend to be poor. Next week is the first episode of Chateau Bijstand.”
Then he starts a fragment of an interview with Erica Meiland on public radio. In it she explains: “Then we get a budget that is calculated exactly as follows: if you are with so many people and a child, you will receive so much child benefit and so much benefit, or do I know. Uhh, a social assistance benefit, of course.”
poverty-stricken
Unbelievable: that woman still has no idea what the finances of people on welfare look like, according to Arjen. “Or do I know?! Your program is called Chateau Assistance! ‘And then I think we should also pay attention to ehhh… What are those things called? uhhh. To the little ones!’”
Arjen thinks it’s a sick format. “So the concept is: celebrities pretend to be poor for a month and then SBS 6 will film that. So that is a kind of poverty-stricken.”
“This is bullsh*t!”
Arjen then shows some fragments from the previous season with the Roelvinkjes. They were surprised with a ‘hilarious’ surprise visit from predecessors Geer and Goor. “That’s the worst thing about being poor: that Gordon can suddenly come by.”
At the end of their season, Dries Roelvink and his family were relieved to get into a luxury taxi again: “Look, we must have this. Are we back in our own little world.”
“And this is exactly why playing slob is such a bullshit,” Arjen explains. “So they have lived like poor people, except that poor people never get an expensive car after a month to take them back to their own world. Because that’s what’s so bad about poverty: it doesn’t stop after a month.”
Povertyep*rno
According to Arjen, poverty is not suitable for TV entertainment. “Then you think: Arjen, what do you care that SBS occasionally puts an illiterate folk singer on welfare? But that poverty p*rno is a whole genre that a lot of people watch. For example, SBS has another such program, Steenrijk Straatarm.”
Arjen thinks that’s like watching monkeys. “If the poor people then go to the rich people’s house, it becomes monkey watching again, but then you give the monkeys all kinds of crazy things that they have never seen before. From: ‘Soon we’re going to give a poor person a shrimp, keep watching!’ What makes it all integer, huh?”
‘Hilarious? New!’
And now the Meilandjes are allowed to make this kind of TV. “They are going to live on social assistance for a month, but then in a house that you can never pay on social assistance benefits. (…) A fun fact, by the way: the Meilandjes seem to have earned about 50,000 euros per episode with their previous program.”
“I don’t know what they’re getting now, but it’s probably not much less. Then those poverty-stricken people earn two annual incomes per episode from a single mother with two children. That’s hilarious isn’t it? New! And that’s why I say: and now it’s over!”
Fragment
The item in question from The Evening Show with Arjen Lubach: