The NPO complains a lot when a cutback is announced, but the money is literally splashing against the skirting boards. “There are at least thirty Marcel Wanders lamps costing 3,500 euros in that building!”
The level of hysteria when a cutback is announced at the NPO is unprecedented: not only the big boss Frederieke Leeflang, but even a broadcaster Rutger Castricum is now crying shame about it. They get more than a billion a year, but act like they’re on TV welfare. As if everything is just going just fine.
1 billion euros
Now that an additional cutback of 50 million euros has been announced, Frederieke speaks of ‘one slap in the face of all those passionate makers at the public broadcaster’. It’s going to affect the programs, she shouts. No more Christmas with Frans Bauer? Janny van der Heijden with oven gloves from Action? The TROS Music Festival without Dries Roelvink?
What nonsense, says former SBS 6 boss Tina Nijkamp. She recently visited the NPO and was able to see very clearly what the annual budget of 1 billion euros goes into. “When you enter the NPO – I have been a guest on a radio program there recently – you do not know what you see,” she says in Tina’s TV Update.
Marcel Wanders
Tina is talking about the Peperbus. “Where the NPO is located and where those hundreds of people work. Well, there are only Marcel Wanders lamps costing 3,500 euros! Yes, how do I know? Because I had just such a lamp. I don’t have that anymore, but there is a whole gallery there. There are about 25 of them there. As many as 30 throughout the building!”
Thirty of those lamps? So that’s more than a ton. “It’s all chic furniture, expensive design here and expensive design there, lamps, sofas, you name it. Then I think: just spend that on programming. You can just go to the Leen Bakker or to IKEA. They also simply sell great furniture that looks great.”
Chic affair
It also looks like a five-star hotel at the individual broadcasters, says Tina. She mentions WNL as an example. “I went in there a few years ago and it’s a chic affair! It’s just a very chic hotel with all kinds of expensive desks, expensive sets, really expensive equipment. It can’t be beat! It’s just a palace there.”
A shame, Tina thinks. “That’s where all that money went into it. In the future, just spend that money on programs instead of all that frills.”
Leen Bakker
There must be honesty about where all that money goes, says Tina. “I think that’s a shame and it’s never mentioned in the press release, that there is tons and tons of furniture and painting and floor coverings and I don’t know what else.”
“When you walk in, you don’t know how chic it is. Then I think: you can just go to the Leen Bakker, right? It doesn’t all have to be so chic, does it? But they don’t like that at the public broadcaster.”