It didn’t matter much if Rutger Castricum had become one of the regular presenters at the start of Op1. “I was in the top ten that were going to be, but then everything went wrong.”
The talk show Op1 is currently in dire straits due to rumblings and quarrels behind the scenes. Now that BNNVARA has decided to leave, three more broadcasters are connected to the program: EO, WNL and Omroep MAX. At the very beginning – Op1 started in January 2020 – there was still talk of PowNed participating.
Rutger in first ten
Rutger Castricum was put forward to present on behalf of that brutal broadcaster, but he didn’t make it. “I’m not sorry about that afterwards,” he says The Orange Summer from last night.
What exactly? “I was one of the first ten to become it, only… The original idea of Op1 – and that appealed to me – was that broadcasters would be mixed at the table. Then I would sit at the table with someone from, for example, BNNVARA or the EO. Then you get that cross-pollination.”
‘Everything went wrong’
Actually, that would have worked much better, Rutger thinks. “Then you don’t always agree on the subjects, but that is actually public broadcasting pur sang. Only then did Frans Klein decide not to do it that way, but to do one broadcast per evening. Everything went wrong there.”
And that is also why Rutger dropped out. “That’s why we couldn’t do it anymore, because I had to do that with someone within my own broadcaster and we didn’t have them available.”
Together with Wilfried
Rutger eventually found another presenter willing to form a duo with him. “Then I asked Wilfried de Jong if he liked it and he actually really liked it. And then the story was, ‘It can’t be two men. It must be a man and a woman.’ In fact, I was already done with it.”
What does he think of Op1 these days? “A k*tprogram.”