In front of a red beacon on the roof of the Pro Sieben building, Klaas Heufer-Umlauf starts the TV experiment with the words “I can say what I want”. Joko Winterscheidt Meanwhile, he stands in the roof hatch because of his fear of heights. The duo won the show last Tuesday, April 16th Joko & Klaas against ProSieben and thus full control over the program for 24 hours. At 00:00, shortly before the takeover, a banner ran across the screen. A final message from the station: “Let’s hope for the best.”
After a start that was intended to set the tone for the coming day in its chaotic nature, the rest of the night is filled with a moderating alpaca and a backwards version of her show “DnuerF retseb nieM”. In the morning there was the best episode and then the worst episode Simpsons on the program. According to Joko and Klaas, “Homer has an enemy” is the best, while the worst is “Lisa goes gaga.” The two then filmed themselves jogging through Berlin in the morning. Not very exciting, but with a unique selling point. You can’t see anything like this on any other channel.
The worst thing Pro Sieben has to offer is the oxen racing
At eleven o’clock they crashed the Sat-1 breakfast television and asked if they could continue broadcasting here too. It is unclear whether this was agreed upon with the partner station. On Pro Sieben you could see Joko cooking eggs and getting a crash course in latte art. At the same time, Klaas munched on his muesli on Sat 1. In the afternoon we played in the Olympic Stadium with the rapper Sido “BrUno” (licensing reasons). Because Klaas had the worst score, he ended up having to eat a Uno card. In between, oryx antelopes were shown in the Namibia desert for half an hour without comment.
Since 24 hours is relatively long, we had to dig deep into the can in the meantime. Joko and Klaas showed 90s talk shows or the “Worst of” the seven worst moments in Pro-Sieben history. By the way, the “ProSieben Ox Race” from 2006 took first place here.
In the past, the duo has often won 15 minutes of airtime. They are increasingly using these to draw attention to socio-political issues. They discussed sea rescue, sexual violence against women, the situation of refugees in Moria and the nursing shortage in Germany. In other cases they came up with something more trivial. In the “0.0 percent rate” project, literally nothing happened for 15 minutes. Another time they swallowed small cameras and showed the insides of their stomachs for fifteen minutes. The two of them are also using the latter variant this Sunday. With success.
The surprise factor unsurprisingly brings high odds
They vaguely announced the program on X in advance. “The big backwards event” at around 4:55 a.m., “Premium Entertainment” at around 1:20 p.m. and a “new show format” at around 8:00 p.m. The fact that you didn’t know what exactly was going to happen made you tune in. The Joko&Klaas program day achieved the highest market share among 14 to 49 year olds at 17.4 percent for the entire day. This meant they had their strongest day since November 2020. In this age group, they achieved the best primetime rating of 20.8 percent.
The new show format was an admittedly not very creative quiz show with the clever name “A very good quiz (with a high prize sum)”. The price question (What is the last line in the lyrics “We are the Champions” by Queen? Spoiler: “We are the Champions”) candidate Carola was able to answer in the end and won 100,000 euros. Joko summed up the day as a “crazy, good ride” and although Klaas emphasized that he had fun, he said that “you don’t have to have that every day”.
In the end it was a mix of archive material and banal live broadcasts. Unpredictability was the recipe for success. But Pro Sieben couldn’t take away one constant: :newstime at 5:45 p.m. As if nothing had happened, presenter Michael Marx briefly stood in front of the camera and read out the news. All that was missing was for Joko and Klaas to moderate it themselves.