de shame procheedure ash effery yeer mish soffffie?

Deleted User wrote: »

For me it is amazing that a sketch that brilliant as a meme has stayed mostly in Germany - but to the point it is literally ingrained in the language. People use that phrase "same procedure as every year" literally every day when I am there.

That phrase used to be common-place in my family as well, particularly when it came to satirical replies, which were legion

With regards to it not having made it much outside Germany, i think there are a few reasons.

The first is that when this was recorded, it wasn't on a national level. It was a local production in Hamburg that was recorded by NDR, the national broadcasting service for Northern Germany. Remember how I mentioned in my original post that Germany has no centralised national broadcaster, like RTE in Ireland. There are a series of regional broadcasters, such as NDR in the north, WDR covering the west (roughly North-Rhine Westphalia and the Rhineland), BR covering exclusively Bavaria (because OF COURSE Bavaria has to have something special), etc., you get the picture.
That means that, even when it started getting broadcast regularly, it only did so in parts of the country. It didn't begin to catch on nationally until the German cable TV infrastructure had been set up in the 1980s, allowing each regional broadcaster to be received everywhere in the country.

Then, there is a cultural issue. We Northern Germans are "special" in a way. Our sense of humour has always been a bit "off", and we've always been a bit more anglophile than the rest of the country. There's a reason why many late 19th century residential areas in Bremen look like a carbon copy of Fulham or Shepherd's Bush in London. You won't see this type of pattern anywhere else in the German speaking world. This anglophilia also means that English is rather more accepted as a language up in the North than in other countries, something particularly prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s. We in the north were simply able to follow along more easily than the rest, which further impeded a quick spread even in Germany.

Finally, Germany was even less popular back then than it is now. A lot of people who had fought and suffered during WW2 were not just still alive, but right in the middle of the workforce, and they certainly didn't want to see some German TV production, particularly in the UK.

So basically, "Dinner for One" has had the deck stacked against it for much of its broadcast history, and to be honest, that niche category adds to its charm for a lot of Germans.

L1011 wrote: »

Are they not all divisions of ARD?

Used to watch a lot of German TV; my spoken German has gone to crap since then unfortunately.

It's actually the other way around. ARD is a joint project run by the individual state or regional broadcasters. Its actual name is (long German monstrosity incoming!): Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, which translates to "Working Group of the Public Service Broadcasters of the Federal Republic of Germany". Ah, the wonders of the German language...

ARD does run its own channel, "Das Erste", and it does produce Germany's premier news programmes, Tagesschau and Tagesthemen, but it is not a full service broadcaster, it doesn't have its own radio stations for example, and it relies on the production facilities of its members to produce its content. Tagesschau and Tagesthemen for example, are aired from NDR's studios in Hamburg.

This is deliberate, by the way. Following World War 2, it was decided that having a single nationwide public broadcasting service in the mould of the BBC would be too much of a risk in case fascist tendencies would ever arise again in Germany. For this reason, regional or state level broadcasters were set up, such as NDR, BR, etc. These all sport a TV station with extensive production facilities, as well as several radio stations, and are completely independent in how they design their programs and shows. You'll see that BR from Bavaria produces a lot more religious, and particular catholic content due to the more conservative nature of that state, while NDR is a lot more secular. SWR from Baden-Wuerttemberg is a lot more adventurous, particularly in its radio programs, while Eastern German MDR is...well... shall we say "special?" Seriously though, back when I still watched German TV, they did a lot of "Ostalgie" shows, which are basically programs that show the nostalgic aspects of the DDR.