Erica Meiland did not think it an option to cancel Chateau Bijstand and throw all the recordings in the garbage. “To say: we are not going to broadcast the whole series… No, I don’t think so.”
It is not often that a TV program is ready on the shelf, but is still put in the bulky waste unbroadcast. RTL 4 did that in 2020 with the program Joling en de Buitenlanders. The channel feared that this would fall really badly at the time of the rise of Black Lives Matter and decided to withdraw it.
No option
SBS 6 would have done well to do the same with Chateau Bijstand now that energy poverty in the Netherlands is only increasing due to the war in Ukraine, said show expert Aran Bade in RTL Boulevard last weekend. Yesterday he spoke to Erica Meiland about the municipal elections.
Erica: “The war broke out on Thursday and we left the following Monday, so for us it was like: what is all this? To then say: we are not going to broadcast the entire series… No, I don’t think so.”
Serious
Chateau Assistance has become a serious program, says Erica. “We’re really working for a good cause and it’s really serious. Look, in episode one you only see how we live here, so you don’t see much about it yet.”
“On episode two we start decorating the house and on three we really start working for the charities. I think people should just go and see first.”
Voice over
TV connoisseur Rob Goossens, also from RTL Boulevard, is not convinced after seeing the first episode. “I actually thought it was worse than I expected and what also didn’t help was that Riny van den Elzen did the voice-over. I think Riny is really great, but that irony actually only makes Martien’s unworldliness worse.”
“There was one bright spot, because we have of course already blown Martien’s face at HLF8 last week and now we have seen that Erica is quite realistic in it. In any case, there is still one person in that family who realizes that it is really just playing sideline.”
Pure entertainment
Rob: “If it turns out at the end of this series that the Babyspullen Foundation is going through the roof, it has still yielded something beautiful. Then it’s fine, but I really didn’t like it at all.”
Colleague Bridget Maasland: “Then it is pure entertainment and then it has nothing to do with wanting to create something socially responsible?”
Luuk Ikink: “Maybe it will come. They have only just begun.”
Bridget: “That’s also possible.”
