For some it’s a nightmare, for others it’s starting their new latenight talk show. Former VVD minister Fred Teeven, the mediagenic (because prototypical) dairy farmer Dolf Heikoop and program maker and provocateur in peripheral issues Maxim Hartman at one table. The nightmare took physical shape on Tuesday at Renze Klamer, who will make his debut as a talk show host on RTL4 this week. Let’s cause a stir, that puts our Renze on the map, the editors must have thought. An aspiration which the three guests, roaring their opinion about the farmers’ protest, readily complied with.
Heikoop won on decibels, Teeven on content (‘The consultation could have been better’), Hartman on jennen: ‘Farmers are not allowed to continue, you have to retrain’, he told the dairy farmer. The story of the respectable D66 mayor of Deventer Ron König about the vicissitudes surrounding the blockade of a distribution center was lost in the verbal cage fight of his table mates – although even the best listener would not discover any new insights into it.
High game from the editors to have just three howler buoys act as sirens, because there is still an audience for serious information. An audience that show openers when he runs away with his ears pressed shut. Those who nevertheless kept watching saw Klamer open an interesting journalistic offensive against fraud in the healthcare sector.
In an item that was vaguely reminiscent of the way Arjen Lubach fills alleged injustice in minutes, Klamer explained that anyone who registers at the Chamber of Commerce with a healthcare company can get started as a social worker. Anyone who wants to open a snack bar needs diplomas, the founder of a care company can even work without a swimming diploma. Only the swindler who makes the most of it runs the risk of having to refund incorrectly collected invoices. ‘Risk-free fraud’, one of the expert guests called it.
Billions disappear into the pockets of scammers, money that is not spent on the residents of care institutions for whom it is intended. In the four weeks that his evening show is scheduled this summer, Klamer wants to fight against such abuses. A commendable initiative, with a built-in disappointment guarantee.
The last item of Renze was for Maxim Hartman. On his Instagram account (60 thousand followers), he rages against ‘the excess of make-up’, the ‘junk with which women smear their mouths’. In particular, the representation of that abuse, influencer Nikkie Tutorials, has to pay for Hartman. “She looks like an ordinary Polish whore.” Klamer was greatly surprised at how Hartman went on: ‘Can’t you choose your words more carefully?’ Hartman didn’t need that: “Where does it say I have to be reasonable?”
The relevant question in this matter came from Fred Teeven: ‘Isn’t this a business model?’ Harmful assumption, Hartman thought.
Klamer concluded that ‘I did get to know you a little better’. Would it?