Bart De Pauw

Wachtebeke, and the sketch shows that got him noticed

Bart De Pauw was born in Wachtebeke, in East Flanders, on 28 May 1968, and his first television credit goes back to 1985 and the programme Meester, hij begint weer!. The work that made his name arrived a decade later. Buiten de Zone, the sketch series he made between 1994 and 1996, built a cult following, and Schalkse Ruiters, which ran from 1996 to 1998, became one of the biggest things on Flemish television, reaching audiences of around two million. Both ran on the same instinct: take the furniture of television itself — the interview, the prank, the format — and bend it until something cracked.

From the start he was a maker rather than a presenter in the ordinary sense. Between 1999 and 2003 he worked behind the scenes on De Mol, the Flemish original of the format later exported as The Mole, and came back to it in 2016. The programmes he fronted were mostly ones he had invented himself, which is part of why losing a broadcaster, rather than losing a job, turned out to be the serious thing.

Het Geslacht De Pauw, Loft, and a company of his own

The most-discussed thing he made was Het Geslacht De Pauw, broadcast in 2004 and 2005: a mock reality series about his own family, staged so that it was never quite clear which parts were real. He was still joking about that on stage two decades later, telling a 2025 theatre audience how the line between fact and fiction had blurred while he was making it. Willy's en Marjetten followed in 2006 and underperformed badly enough to be pulled early.

In 2008 he founded the production company Koeken Troef with Helen Perquy, and in October of that year the thriller Loft, which he wrote, reached cinemas and became a very large commercial success — large enough to be remade in Hollywood in 2014. The decade that followed was steady format work rather than event television: De Kinderpuzzel in 2010, De Kazakkendraaiers in 2011, Quiz Me Quick and Twee tot de zesde macht in 2012, De Biker Boys in 2014, and It's showtime for Telenet in 2017.

2017 to 2021: the complaints, the trial, the verdict

In November 2017 several women took complaints of grensoverschrijdend gedrag to VRT. The broadcaster ended its collaboration with him and he was replaced as presenter of Twee tot de zesde macht. The file went to an investigating magistrate on 8 September 2020.

On 25 November 2021 the criminal court in Mechelen found him guilty of stalking five women — among them the actors Ella-June Henrard and Liesa Naert — and of harassment by electronic means of a sixth. The sentence was six months' imprisonment, suspended, with a three-year probation period. The counts brought by Maaike Cafmeyer and Lize Feryn were not held proven. Nine women appeared as civil parties, each claiming a symbolic one euro. The court worked through a three-part test on each count: whether the facts themselves were established, whether the woman's peace had been seriously disturbed, and whether he had known he was causing that disturbance.

On 10 December 2021 he said he would not appeal, on the grounds that "de rust is nu belangrijker dan het juridische gevecht" — calm mattering more than the legal fight. He has not worked for VRT since 2017, and has said a return to television in front of the camera is unlikely.

Het uur van de olifant: the 2025 return

The stage, not the studio, was the route back. Het uur van de olifant opened at the Stadsschouwburg in Antwerp on 29 April 2025, seven years after the complaints. He walked on to a standing ovation, opened with a song accompanied by the pianist Miguel Wiels, and worked in front of a large wooden elephant that stayed on stage as the evening's central image. The material mixed sketches, anecdotes, songs, pre-recorded film and callbacks to his old programmes, with jokes about his infidelity and about the stalking case, and quieter stretches in which he expressed remorse for what he called his dark period.

The premiere audience included the Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever, the singer Karen Damen, and the businessmen Fernand Huts and Marc Coucke; Coucke's verdict afterwards was that it was "echt weer van het niveau van vroeger". At that point the run stood at 19 performances and roughly 30,000 tickets. It closed in spring 2026 at the Capitole in Gent, finishing on 22 performances and more than 33,000 attendees, and he used that last night to announce the follow-up, trailed by a comic video featuring Wiels and Coucke.

De Stoute Bart De Pauw Show, and the demand for it

The new show was announced on 19 November 2025 for autumn 2026, with the producer Gracia Live promising something "verrassender, grappiger en gedurfder" than its predecessor. It premiered at the Capitole in Gent on 30 September 2026, with Stadsschouwburg Antwerp dates from 28 October and the Trixxo Theater in Hasselt on 10 November.

Demand pushed the run out quickly. On 27 May 2026 five extra performances were added, taking the tour to thirteen and bringing in the Kursaal in Ostend, where the date now stands at 31 January 2027. Antwerp's presale opened the following morning, 28 May; two of the Gent performances had sold out before that. Tickets are listed at €49 to €59 including fees, in seated theatre and concert halls.

The premise is the opposite of a memoir. Rather than talking about the past, he invents television formats on stage and tries them out on the room: a Woke Politie, a West Flemish-accented Real Housewives parody billed on venue listings as The Real Housewives of Wachtebeke, and the Man van Melle sent to Temptation Island. Pre-recorded video does much of the work, with Karen Damen appearing in the woke-police film.

What the critics make of the second act

The reviews have been markedly worse than for the elephant show. Writing for Knack Focus in early October 2026 under the headline asking why the show mainly makes one sad, the theatre critic Els Van Steenberghe argued that it is built on frustration — the frustration of a very talented television maker sidelined by his own behaviour towards women and no longer offered work in the industry — and that little remains of the urgency, sincerity and freshness that carried the previous production. She counted a lot of coarse material about diversity, gender and what may and may not be said.

Schamper, the Ghent University student magazine, was blunter still, calling the woke-police sketch with Damen and the West Flemish Housewives parody the worst sketches in the world with too much budget behind them, and comparing the humour to a right-wing cousin at a summer barbecue who, a few Karmeliets in, starts complaining that nothing can be said any more.

Audiences are not following the critics. The previous tour's 33,000 attendees and the sold-out Gent dates for this one suggest the division sits between the press and the halls, and he has leaned on that himself: the Ostend listing quotes him saying it means a great deal that so many people enjoyed last year's show and are coming back for another.