Ivo Niehe surprised the editors of Time for MAX with a rather bizarre demand. “At first I thought they were joking, because I don’t know Ivo and Ivo doesn’t know me.”
The format of Time for MAX is that guests sit at the table for an entire episode so that they can also talk about each other’s subjects. That works fine, until you invite Ivo Niehe. Sterallures is pretty much his middle name: after he recently demanded that NPO Radio 1 turn off the studio webcam, he also turned things upside down at MAX.
Ivo not at the table
Ivo was a few weeks ago guest at the afternoon show and demanded at the very last minute that the format be changed. He did not want to sit at the table with writer Tim Gouw, who is a stay-at-home father and has written a book about it. The broadcast therefore opened with a much emptier table than usual.
At the introduction of the guests, presenter Carrie ten Napel showed a photo of Ivo with the announcement that he would join the broadcast later, as if he was late. But nothing could be further from the truth, Tim now reveals in his podcast Daddy Has To Do It. “Someone from the editorial office came up to me and took me aside.”
“Is this a joke?”
What did that editor say to Tim? “She said, ‘Tim, listen up, here’s what’s going on. We would do an item about your book and Ivo Niehe would also sit at the table and then we actually wanted to ask Ivo a kind of follow-up question. From: hey Ivo, what do you actually think about your fatherhood? Because he also has children.’”
Well, Ivo definitely didn’t want that. “So he had informed the editors that same afternoon that he did not want to sit at the table with me. At first I thought they were joking, because I don’t know Ivo and Ivo doesn’t know me. So how could you not want to sit down with me? But it had to do with the subject.”
Paternity
Ivo wanted to avoid any chance of a question about paternity. Perhaps an interview with the Volkskrant disliked him, in which he was asked shortly before what kind of father he was: “I never wanted to have myself as a father, because I was always with my mind on work. I never read them. That is a scandal.”
After those statements, Ivo then fell silent to think for a moment. Dan: “It is not much about the book, I think, until now. As long as you write down that it’s a nice book. Then I think it’s good.”
‘Very sorry’
Anyway: Tim thinks it’s crazy. “So he didn’t want to sit there and then run the risk that there would be a question about his own paternity. I thought that was really weird and they thought it was weird too. They thought it was a great pity, because they would have liked that. Well, it just wasn’t going to happen.”
Tim thinks that is a bit silly for someone like Ivo. “The format is that all guests are all sitting at the table and then we can also respond to each other a bit. Then it’s a little less kind of finishing place. At the opening, the impression was given that he was not there yet. But that was just purely because he did not want to sit at the table.”
Shake hand
In the studio Ivo wasn’t really nice either, says Tim. “At a certain point I get off my chair and I give Ivo a hand while he is standing behind. I said: ‘Hey, Ivo, I warmed up that chair for you, sit down and good luck with it.’”
What did Ivo say to that? “I got a very weak hand and there was hardly any response.”
Fragment
The conscious opening of Time for MAX:
