A year after his short adventure at Shownieuws, Victor Vlam decides to break the silence about his then colleague Patty Brard. He draws a parallel with Matthijs van Nieuwkerk.
It’s no secret that Patty Brard has a reputation in Hilversum. She is not an easy woman to work with and many have already experienced this: an insider told Story in 2011 that Patty belittled the (end) editors of Shownieuws. “People are also afraid of her. Three editors-in-chief have already ended up in sick leave.”
Patty’s true nature
Patty responded with a shrug of the shoulders a day after the Story story (“if you go for the best end result and you’re a woman, it soon becomes the case that you’re very difficult”), but a month later she was evicted by SBS 6. Only then did Patty show the back of her tongue. She called the editors of Shownieuws ‘incompetent’.
Patty has now been back at Shownieuws for years, but she still refuses to sit down at the table with Story boss Guido den Aantrekker. Victor Vlam did experience her up close last summer; he then spent three months on the summer edition of the program. And there he got to see the true nature of Patty…
Rumors
Patty is not undisputed. At the end of last year, people were already wondering whether she was or is not just the Matthijs van Nieuwkerk of SBS, although she does not recognize herself in that image at all. And Yvonne Coldeweijer announced a month and a half ago that a major scandal about Patty is coming, but that is still waiting.
According to Victor, this television star is simply not pure coffee. He recently pointed out Patty’s bizarre swipe at colleague Airen Mylene, for which he believes she deserves a suspension. “And this is something that happens more often,” he says, pointing to the fact that in 2021 Patty also publicly went wild with colleague Frits Huffnagel.
Cross-border
Is Patty guilty of misconduct? “We’ve talked about that topic a lot in this podcast,” says Victor in The Communicados. “One of the conclusions is that Matthijs van Nieuwkerk should have been corrected sooner and more often when small things went wrong to prevent things from getting out of hand.”
He continues: “I think that should actually happen at the moment with Patty Brard. (…) She also did it with Jan Versteegh, with whom she presented 6 Inside at one point. That man really made her life miserable. It was terribly embarrassing to watch. Really unbelievable.”
The big star
Patty, according to Victor, thinks she’s some kind of TV god. “Patty Brard is of course the big star of Shownieuws. It is someone who has been around in the entertainment world for more than 40 years. (…) This is also the reasoning that has long been used by Matthijs van Nieuwkerk. He was also the big star of DWDD, so ‘let him do his thing’.”
Don’t repeat that mistake with Patty, he thinks. “Look, the tricky thing about this kind of thing is that… I’ve never talked about it, because I just don’t think it’s proper to talk about things. I say this for a reason, of course. My opinion is informed by my own experiences in this area.”
‘Very hard’
Victor refers to his own collaboration with Patty in the summer edition of Shownieuws. “I don’t think Patty was sweet. At least she wasn’t sweet to me. She was pretty hard on me. But I’ve never had the feeling that I have to say something about that.”
He continues: “I have to tell you very honestly: I am no longer bothered by Patty, because we no longer work together. And that’s something I don’t mind at all. But how we look at transgressive behavior has changed in our society, of course.”
‘Not a good pattern’
Victor now wonders aloud if Patty has escaped the dance. “I sometimes wonder, with all the things we’re seeing coming out and the pattern that’s also being outlined here, maybe Patty’s behavior is behavior that was considered annoying but accepted a few years ago, but would we do that today? still take it that way?”
In the end, he worked with her for three months. “So I can’t give a definitive answer. But the pattern of what you see in front of the screens alone: yes, I don’t think that’s very good… And if you also take into account that in the past, for example, an article was written by the AD with the headline ‘Patty Brard terrorizes the editors of Shownieuws‘…”
Matthijs from SBS?
According to Victor, messages like that are writing on the wall. “Yes, there were also articles about Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, there are many similarities. Again, I honestly don’t know if that’s true. I have far too little insight into the matter for that, but I really hope that people at Talpa are on top of it.”
Co-host Lars Duursma: “It is more likely that this is the tip of the iceberg. Where there’s smoke, there is fire. Perhaps also a call to Talpa and John de Mol to at least take a good look at it.”
Patty often reacts laconically when she is criticized for her performance. This week she mockingly called herself ‘the witch of Shownieuws’.