Nine years after the end of his famous talk show Pauw & Witteman, Jeroen Pauw opens up about his former co-host Paul Witteman. “Yes, he stank from his mouth.”
It is almost impossible to imagine it because of the failed Op1 quarrel project, but the late evening of NPO 1 was once a prestigious time slot with popular talk shows such as Pauw & Witteman, Pauw and Jinek. The first title in particular has run for a long time: the show was on the channel for eight seasons, from 2006 to 2014.
Pauw smelled Witteman
Jeroen Pauw briefly looked back on it last night in the talk show Marcel & Gijs. “There are times – when there is really a lot of news or when something special happens – when I miss it and regret not doing it, but I thought five days a week was quite a long period. 14.5 years to be exact. I didn’t get home until around 2:30 in the morning.”
How did he shape his collaboration with Paul Witteman? “We were very close together. Really next to each other with the seats. We could feel and smell each other and hear the breath of the other.”
‘stank from his mouth’
It makes host Gijs Groenteman curious. “How does he smell from his mouth, Paul Witteman? To violets?”
Then Jeroen confesses that Paul does indeed smell a bit sometimes. “Hmmm… There were times when I thought: he does indeed smell from his mouth, and he must have thought the same about me. The advantage was of course that we always ate the same thing that night, so if you smell something, you actually smell yourself.”
Not on Saturday night
During the weekend, Jeroen and Paul always took a breather. “We sat close together, we talked all day about topics and guests or whatever. But that also means that we had enough of each other during the weekend, so we didn’t go out for dinner or anything else on Saturday evening.”
Were there also annoyances between the two gentlemen? “Paul was annoyed that I was sighing. I can sigh quite often when I find it boring and of course it is sometimes boring. Or if I put my hand under my jaw, he also found that annoying.”
‘I say nothing!’
Once there was some quarrel between Pauw and Witteman. “There was one time when he wanted to see through Alexander Pechtold about entering into a left-wing partnership, while I said: ‘What is left? Pechtold is not left-wing at all!’ ‘Yes, but it is still a left-wing collaboration!’ Then I didn’t ask a single question out of protest,” says Jeroen.
A talk show host who doesn’t ask questions for twenty minutes? Ah, do we also remember what Eva Jinek remembered from those coaching sessions with Jeroen. She only made it eight months a year…