Gerard Joling has said it before: his manager Wino Omtzigt would rather not have him in Today Inside. He repeats that this weekend in the AD. Could it cost him millions?
It is no secret that the moral compass of the RTL management is relatively sharply adjusted for a company in the Dutch media world. While they have been looking for that thing in the wings at Talpa for years, RTL boss Peter van der Vorst walks around with it in the corridors every day. Who can stay and who will be out?
Joling in the garbage can
Peter immediately pulled the emergency brake when he was shown recordings of the new show Joling and the Foreigners in 2021. It is no secret that the entertainer is critical of Islam and apparently Peter found the interim result a bit too xenophobic, because shortly after the outbreak of the Black Lives Matter movement he decided to cancel everything.
We have never seen Joling and the Foreigners on TV. Bow down woke, Johan Derksen called it. “Gerard has been on the road for a year filming, he went to Suriname and interviewed all kinds of figures there, and now Mrs. Simons and the woke community have asked questions about it and RTL is withdrawing its opinion.”
Churches and mosques
Peter just threw all that money away. For fear that Gerard’s conservative opinion would damage himself and of course RTL 4 as a whole. Weak, said Johan. “I think if you put Joling on it, you shouldn’t be surprised what comes out of it. I find that incomprehensible.”
He continued at the time: “Joling has always said: ‘The foreigners will become the bosses in the Netherlands and we will soon have more mosques than churches.’ Then you already know how he gets into such a program.”
Not to VI anymore
In any case: apparently people in Gerard’s environment are afraid that he will say xenophobic things if he takes part in a right-wing conservative program such as Today Inside. His manager Wino Omtzigt doesn’t want it, Gerard said six months ago. That was the last time he was there. And now Gerard repeats that again in the A.D.
Gerard tells the newspaper: “You absolutely can’t say what you want anymore. When I join VI, my management here is not very happy about it. You take three white wines and then shout all kinds of things, they say. That is then reflected in summaries and then I sometimes think: maybe I should have thought about it longer.”
‘When at VI?’
It appears to be a risk analysis by Gerard’s manager. After all: one slip-up at Today Inside and Peter van der Vorst’s moral compass is completely turned upside down. And then such an appearance in the SBS 6 talk show could easily cost Gerard millions of euros, because his TV contract with RTL 4 is undoubtedly very lucrative.
Gerard concludes: “My mother is no longer alive, but she sometimes spoke to me: did you have to shout that again? As a mother, she suffered from it during the bridge drive, because everyone started talking about it. But people think it’s fantastic, because I’ve been asked five times on the street when I’ll be joining VI again.”