If Jörg Draeger asked his guests whether they wanted to stick to their choice, for the sake of probabilistic reasons they didn’t have to think twice. The few times that I watched the show “Geht aufsumung” in the 1990s during my student days, that never happened, again and again they let themselves be unsettled by Draeger. Probably hardly any candidate had taken note of the fact that the final of the game show was based on the goat problem. If Draeger did not open the gate of three that the candidate chose and, given the meager profit, offered to change his choice, he should do so, that is, change the gate. Then the chance of winning is twice as great as if the candidate sticks to his or her original election.
Originally the show ran from 1992 to 1997 on Sat.1, recently Draeger emerged from the media limbo “Let’s dance” and from the actual television hell “Promi-Big-Brother”. Now Draeger no longer shows his Zonks on the previous evening, but on Friday at prime time. In German “Hauptsendezeit”, which began when all dads had trimmed their wristwatches and pendulum clocks with the daily news gong to the officially guaranteed time. When the days of the week were different colors. It’s not a cliché, before the ARD main news broadcast began, my father sat with his thumb and forefinger on the other wrist, with his ears and eyes to the television screen, to press the crown of his mechanical wristwatch on point 8 and thus return the exactness announced from Hamburg to the day.
59 is the new 49
Meanwhile, my father is no longer alive and I’m just about to no longer belong to the main advertising target group. Actually, I should have left it already, because originally RTL had arbitrarily set it to the group of 14 to 49-year-olds, in 2013 the private broadcaster also added those up to 59 years. Above all, these people, their as yet unrecognized and exciting desires as well as their wallets are subject to the constant interruptions in broadcasts, which I largely avoided – also with the help of technology, but later on. Whereby: After I had once explained in length and breadth to my father, who is far from the Internet, what I do as a news editor at heise online, he summarized it briefly: “You earn your money with advertising.” He wasn’t entirely wrong about that. In 2016, with the introduction of DVB-T 2 HD, the commercial channels were completely removed from my channel list and now I also live in the world of streaming and media libraries.
So I not only missed Draeger’s comeback, Thomas Gottschalk’s return with “Wetten, dass …” also passed me by. But not to about 14.5 million people who are said to have watched the show almost two months ago. The show, with the game idea from Frank Elstner and not from the USA, evidently had a nostalgic potential for mobilization, as the television makers of “TV Total” or the re-edition of “Dalli Dalli” had promised or might have promised. I belong more to the generation “Am Laufenden Band” or “One Will Win”, game shows that we watched as children together with our parents on Saturday evening with chips, flips, soda and chocolate bars that even float in milk. “Wetten dass …” will probably have been the last dinosaur that a family spent together in front of the television on Saturday evening. Now they are splintered by smartphones and tablets, each with their own program in their echo chambers. The viewers want a TV campfire around which all generations can gather, like the outgoing ARD chairman Tom Buhrow as a result of the future dialogue with the audience this week Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
Not Gottschalk, Raab or Draeger, but Rudi Carrell, Hans Rosenthal, Peter Alexander, Wim Thoelke, Peter Frankenfeld and Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff, also Uschi Nerke and Ilja Richter structured the weeks and evenings. In 2018, the documentary filmmaker Regina Schilling erected a very moving documentary monument to the older of them. As a pok, I couldn’t have known how much the showmaster and actor Kulenkampff had in common with the fate of my father, who was quietly behind me, lying on the carpet, smoking his pipe and leafing through the newspaper. Fire, pipe, Stanwell.
As was the case with von Kulenkampff in his program, not much was heard from my father in everyday life about the brutal youth on the Eastern Front. Kulenkampff lost his toes, my father lost the promises of a good future. We learn about Hans Rosenthal here at the latest about his struggle for survival as a hidden Jew in the capital of the Nazi Empire. Schilling’s film aroused so much sympathy even on the ungrateful slot just before Thursday night that the ARD broadcast it several times, also in order to be able to make it available again in the media library.
Failed state radio
Otherwise my father had it more with animal documentaries, sports shows and the educational radio in the third. A dull man in a tank top discussed mathematical formulas there. My mother was more likely to be banned by Stefan Derrick and his predecessor Herbert Keller, where the inspectors shook their heads at the death of a junkie and grabbed the liquor bottle in their desk and allowed themselves one or two, which Paul Trimmel also liked to do on the neighboring channel. In Ede Zimmermann’s “Caution Trap”, at least every second stitch of the Nepper, tug and farmer catcher was to be reduced to the principle of prepayment. Together with me and James Dean my mother shed tears beyond Eden and when “Piggy Dick” ran, I called her loudly through the house from the laundry room. The cartoon show with Roadrunner, Speedy Gonzales and Bugs Bunny was discontinued at the beginning of the 1970s at the instigation of the then Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of Social Affairs, Heiner Geißler, because it seemed too aggressive and brutal to him.
From the ZDF that broadcast from 1963 after Konrad Adenauer had failed to install a nationwide German television station that was not supposed to be subordinate to the federal states like ARD, but to the federal government. Adenauer was the ARD too critical of the government. At that time there was talk of “state radio”, a word that the men from the far right now want to revive, but this time also means the ARD, which is controlled by the government; a reproach that I, too, who does not work in public law, is occasionally thought of while I am counting the money that Merkel has transferred to me. The Federal Constitutional Court stopped Adenauer television with its first of twelve broadcast judgments on February 28, 1961.
“Christmas four-part” was shown on ZDF from 1964, beginning with the film adaptation of “Robinson Crusoe”. I was still too young for that, as I was for the moon landing and other street sweepers like the Edgar Wallace films. The first thing that got stuck with me was the “Leather Stocking Stories”, which were broadcast from December 25th to 28th, 1969. Between the years immersed in the forests of Nat Bumppos and Chingachgooks. Later I was fascinated by “Tom Sawyer’s Adventure” and “Treasure Island” when they were repeated and I was also able to read them myself, the “Sea Wolf” and “Michael Strogoff”. Since many of the impulses we feel today have their roots far back in the past, although we are not always aware of them, I suspect that this four-part series was inspired by the former ZDF tradition. With David Balfour I got out of the tradition, the title melody was probably too cheesy for me.
Zigzags, chicken poop
And now it’s Christmas. Not the stumbling butler James, the little lord can be seen again on the first German television screen and the day after tomorrow on 3sat James Stewart as George Bailey, who wants to put an end to his life, but Clarence saves him and shows him how the world is would look like without him – devoured by predatory capitalism. In the end, of course, people cry everywhere, this time on this side of Eden. These are programs that set fixed points in the year, like “Die Hard” on the day when the Savior is said to have slowly passed, as well as a man named Brian. But now it’s winter and the time when Hoppenstedts Dicki is given a nuclear power plant and Grandpa thinks that more tinfoil used to dangle on the Christmas tree. “Zigzags, chicken poop,” tonight at the First.
With this and much more, the ideas of Vicco von Bülows alias Loriot stuck with us; “The picture is hanging crooked”. Dieter Hallervordens “Nonstop Nonsense”, to which we owe bonmots like “palim palim” or “a bottle of french fries”, could be seen as a humorous antipole. He stands in the tradition of the “fathers of clothes”, which ZDF presented us on Fridays with texts by Hans Dieter Hüsch, while Loriot could be assigned to the fine British humor to the absurdity of Monty Python. Their sketch series “Flying Circus” was first shown in full in 1991 in Germany on N3, fortunately with the original sound and not dubbed into German by Sat.1 as seven years later.
How do I know Little Lord and George Bailey will flicker over to us this Christmas too? Since I bought my last TV magazine around 2008, not this one Listenwho I grew up with and who made Monday yellow, Tuesday green, Wednesday blue, Thursday pink, Friday purple, Saturday red and Sunday orange, the day between red and Monday. There was something in the local newspaper about Little Lord and George Bailey. My only remaining regular TV show is now on Sundays at 8:15 p.m., and when I watch TV, it is according to my own preferences or, as it is technically known, non-linearly.
From the sofa to the ticker
As a news editor, I have to be up to date while working anyway, so there is no need to watch TV news on top of that. You think. It can happen that I make myself comfortable after work, accidentally catch the news on TV and get drawn to the desk again to ticker. This happened on the night of January 7th this year, when I saw pictures of the storming of the Capitol in Washington and said the news was also relevant for heise online.
Another incident could have taught me early on. On Christmas Day 2004, I had completed a new ticker shift, at that time still with a modem as a guest at my girlfriend at the time on the Internet. Only when I had finished the shift did I find out that more than 200,000 people had died that day as a result of a seaquake and tsunami in the Indic. I only went to websites that were only relevant for the topic selection for the news ticker on heise online.
17 years later I have a much faster Internet in which the many communication channels that are now there – also on my smartphone when traveling – and that sorely need this bandwidth would certainly have presented me with such great news in no time at all. The television programs now also come to me from the Internet, in a non-linear selection that I never knew before.
I have taken the whole stony path to this freedom, which digital natives can hardly understand. More on that tomorrow, I’ll keep writing for now.
(anw)