John de Bever has met Monique Hansler in real life and has a strong feeling that she plays a character in her program in order to achieve TV success. “What she does is played.”
Actually, everyone agrees that Monique Hansler comes across as a very nasty person on television. Her nasty energy is contagious, so as a celebrity you would rather not be associated with it. Yet John de Bever and his husband Kees de Bever chose to feature in their reality series; they went to the opening of their beach club in Altea.
Viewer deception
Why did John and Kees choose this? Kees chimes in The Telegraph: “I laughed with her. People want to see this, don’t they? She doesn’t argue with me. Someone from RTL Boulevard even called me to ask if we wouldn’t like to have ourselves cut out of the soap. That goes a long way, doesn’t it?”
John says that, in his opinion, audience deception is being committed: “It was just a booking for me to open their beach club. She doesn’t have to yell at me like that. But I think what she is doing is a joke.”
No booking
That about that booking is incorrect, Kees corrects at the desk Show news. “To be clear: we did that for nothing, because it now says everywhere that it was a booking for us. No, we just wanted to be nice and put Altea on the map, because if there is something in Altea, we will be called, which is also nice.”
He continues: “We opened it and were there for ten minutes. I saw that there was just a woman standing there who is a personality. People want real people on TV and I think she is real as we see her.”
Not really
Ehh, Monique is authentic? His husband John thinks differently about this. Kees: “Yes, John says: ‘Monique is not real’, but we mean that it is not the Hanslers’ dream to open a café in Altea. They also tried that with us. If you have a series, there must be a goal.”
This is typical behavior of TV makers, according to Kees. “They said to us: ‘Kees, it would be nice if you opened a café in Benidorm and then we would make a series of it.’”
Refusal
The Beavers didn’t feel like that. “We said: ‘We’re not going to do that, because people won’t fall for it.’”
The opening of that beach club is not an idea of the Hanslers, Kees emphasizes. “I think the producer had known for a long time that this was going to happen and they thought: we’ll put them in a café for six months. She said: ‘I’ve never worked so hard before,’ but the men were sweating and she was parading!”