Renze Klamer was attacked in the clubhouse of his own RTL 4, namely RTL Boulevard. There they describe the departure of the talk show host from RTL Tonight as… ‘good riddance’. Huh?!
It shouldn’t get any crazier: at RTL Boulevard they try to frame Renze Klamer’s departure from the soulless and failed RTL Tonight as some kind of victory. “It sounds crazy because he could be 100 percent right, but in this case I would say: good riddance,” TV expert Rob Goossens shouts at the desk.
Not a nice picture
Almost all media experts agree that RTL Tonight has failed and no longer has a chance of becoming a hit, but this is the prestige project of channel boss Peter van der Vorst and he is too proud to admit this failure. Who couldn’t take it anymore? Renze, by far the most important presenter of the program. He has resigned.
Critics such as Hélène Hendriks and Jan de Hoop think that Peter has lost his way, but at RTL Boulevard they look at it differently. According to Rob, Renze’s exit is especially bad for the image. “All this time they have been saying: ‘Internally we are confident that the course is right’, but if one of your figureheads leaves, that is not a good image.”
Grumpy Renze?
The Renze exit is good for team spirit, Rob believes. “I find Beau’s words very telling. He says: ‘We talked about it and saw if we could work it out together.’ He actually says: ‘Renze, who has been walking around with a grumpy face for months, can’t even enjoy the program when he presents it…’”
“He has never said anything positive about RTL Tonight. The most positive things he said were politically correct things like: ‘I’m curious to see how things will turn out.’”
Sour face
Presenter Morad El Ouakili cannot quite follow Rob. “Yes, but it wasn’t that he was unpleasant on the broadcast or had a sour face.”
Rob: “Yes, but not as if you think: here is a gigantic mood maker, while he can do that. When you hear Beau about: ‘We looked to see if we could find a solution’, it seems a bit like Renze said: ‘My way or the highway.’”
Golden formula
Renze’s hard attitude does not help, according to Rob. “Then I understand that you have a team with several presenters and an editorial staff who all think something… If there is one person who wants to go in a different direction than the rest… The rest of course also wants things to be better… That is not the difference.”
“I think we can all conclude that something is not going well at RTL Tonight. It may well be that Renze has the golden formula in mind, but if the rest all want to go in a certain direction, then there is no point in moving the entire ship in the direction of one person, while the rest have no confidence in it.”
Titanic
The world turned upside down. Is Captain Renze really the only one of the entire team who sees that RTL Tonight is sailing towards a life-size ice cliff like a kind of TV Titanic? Hilarious.
Good riddance, Rob thinks. And what should they do with Renze? “It is now cheaper for RTL in terms of risks and everything to put Renze on the reserve bench than to terminate his contract, because suppose the NPO then says: ‘We have just brought in Roos Moggré, but we are adding Renze’, then you will suddenly strengthen your competitor!”
Pauw & De Wit
Roos is the new stand-in presenter of Pauw & De Wit, and we know from that program that Jeroen Pauw is open to his own departure if a good successor from the new generation is ready. And Renze has now more than proven himself…
TV authority Tina Nijkamp would very much like Renze to be able to leave RTL. “No dramatic exit, no media fit, just a clear decision: this format does not work. In a TV world where people prefer to reassure each other rather than correct each other, this is surprisingly mature. He draws a clear line,” she says in De Telegraaf.
“It’s going to be okay!”
In the meantime, they keep shouting at RTL Tonight that everything will be fine. Albert Verlinde — also no longer to be taken seriously — croaks The Telegraph: “You all try to get it right. If you can’t or don’t want to, that’s the end of it. We have Beau, Leonie and Humberto, so I think everything will be fine.”
Tina cynically: “RTL tonight stumbles along and the rest of Hilversum watches as a channel boss continues to convince himself that the decline is actually an upward trend; you just have to keep it upside down.”