Wilfred Genee and his colleagues at Today Inside are criticized for filling the extra-long Friday broadcast with an endless compilation of highlights.
Today Inside is a great success on SBS 6 and the milking has started. Since this month, Wilfred Genee, René van der Gijp and Johan Derksen have to fill not an hour, but an hour and a half (!) with their talk show on Fridays. And they do this partly by broadcasting a long compilation of highlights of the four broadcasts before.
Unbelievable
Sad, say the gentlemen of the Communicadospodcast. “Isn’t it also an unbelievable story? They’ve been giving up all this time [de lange uitzendingen van] Eva Jinek and then John de Mol says once: ‘But guys, you’re welcome too.’ And then everyone actually says: okay, sign at the cross,” says debate expert Lars Duursma.
Colleague Victor Vlam: “It doesn’t really take an hour and a half. It started at 9:10 PM and it ended at 10:30 PM, so one hour and twenty minutes. And there is a house band, so they also play two songs. Then they have an extra commercial break. And they also have a flashback at the beginning of what happened that week.”
Long compilation
That long compilation fills things up nice and fast, says Victor. “It’s a montage of, I believe, something like three or four minutes. So those 20 minutes filled up relatively quickly. It actually fell… It wasn’t that much longer than usual.”
Lars thinks it’s a shabby way to fill your broadcast. “Isn’t it very sad that you fill your broadcast with a compilation of your own program?”
Victor: “It is easy content, yes. Yes, sure, yes.”
Lars: “It’s a bit like Good Times Bad Times, that it starts with: ‘Yesterday at Good Times Bad Times.’”
Additional commercial block
Everything for the money, says Victor. “Of course, Talpa is all about that extra commercial break, because it contains two commercial breaks instead of one. Yes, that is of course very profitable in itself, because that is a well-watched program. It had more than 900,000 viewers on Friday. That is good cash.”
Lars about the extra long broadcast: “So you’re going to see this five days a week?”
Victor: “Well, there are limits to whether you can do this for five days, of course… The lesson of Eva Jinek is that: there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I don’t think anyone thinks Eva was wise to extend that program massively. So they have to be careful with that.”
Drama queens
Finally, what do Lars and Victor believe about the most recent VI feud? Lars: “Occasionally I read articles about which they have now argued again. And then I’m like, either these are really incredible drama queens who are too sad for words and do argue about every possible little thing. Or they do it consciously, because this leads to higher viewing figures.”
Victor: “I have the impression that this was really exaggerated. This was greatly exaggerated and then milked out as allusions were made to it all the time. (…) Then, of course, another twenty newspaper articles are written. That’s conflict that ultimately creates higher ratings. So there is, I suspect, a very clear strategy behind it.”