30 years of VIVA
Documentary tells the story of the cult station
Among the most striking VIVA heads: Nils Bokelberg (left), Collien Ulmen-Fernandes and Markus Kavka.
© ARD Kultur/Florida Factual
Today, December 1st, the legendary music station VIVA would have turned 30 years old. An ARD documentary tells his crazy story.
No other German station embodied the attitude to life of the 90s as much as the music station, which closed in 2018 VIVA. And no other broadcaster has brought in so many TV talents who still shape the German television landscape today. In the ARD documentary “The VIVA Story – too cool for this world!” these talents come together once again to tell the story of this extraordinary TV experiment from their perspective.
As hosts, former VIVA stars Nils Bokelberg (47), Markus Kavka (56) and Collien Ulmen-Fernandes (42) each lead through one episode. In addition, a seemingly endless series of other VIVA veterans have their say, including names that are still well known today such as Matthias Opdenhövel (53), Mola Adebisi (50), Oliver Pocher (45), Klaas Heufer-Umlauf (40) and Gülcan Kamps (41). .
Other colleagues such as Stefan Raab (57), Heike Makatsch (52) and Niels Ruf (50) do not contribute their own anecdotes, but are also acknowledged in detail in the large number of film finds recovered from the archives. In addition to the then VIVA managing director Dieter Gorny (70), the program managers and editorial managers from back then also contributed insightful insider knowledge.
Chaos and imperfection as trademarks
The documentary offers particularly interesting insights behind the scenes into the origins of the station, which is famous for its brightly colored anarchism. Although the chaotic and imperfect was part of the concept from the beginning, it also arose essentially from the fact that the station and its individual formats had to be built in no time at all in order to fill the broadcasting license it had acquired with programming and life .
In his remarks, former VIVA boss Gorny makes it clear why the time was definitely ripe for a new music and youth channel at the beginning of the 1990s: MTV’s triumph had its last public music program aimed at young people, “Formula One”. Television was swept away and the first German music channel attempt, “Musicbox,” also disappeared from the scene again without a sound. With this elimination, the German music industry was also deprived of an important promotion platform for its artists.
Declaration of war on the music TV giant MTV
In order to close this gap and declare war on the all-powerful monopolist MTV, an initiator GmbH made up of former “Musicbox” editors joined forces with decision-makers and financiers from various major labels such as Warner Music, EMI and Polygram. According to legend, the name VIVA came about as an acronym for “video processing company” – after all, the main aim of the various formats was to get music videos into rotation via the moderators who acted as “VJs” and to promote the label artists through them.
However, VIVA emerged not only as a competitor, but also as an alternative to the US giant MTV. Communication with the audience should be less mature and clarified, which is why very young representatives of the target group were specifically chosen for the moderator castings that took place only two months before the broadcast started. Among the first members of the VIVA family, the student Nils Bokelberg, who was only seventeen years old at the time, and his colleagues Heike Makatsch and Mola Adebisi, who were also very young and completely inexperienced, were chosen.
The station as a “cool family” and mouthpiece for young people
The media manager Marcus Wolter (55), who was responsible for the presenter search at the time, describes the casting concept in the ARD documentary as follows: “We had defined each role model a little bit, somewhere between a cool shared apartment, a cool family and a soap.” The aim was to give the audience the feeling that they were also part of this cool family.
Heike Makatsch opened the very first broadcast on December 1, 1993 with the words: “We are VIVA. And we are more than just a television station. Because we are your mouthpiece and your friend. And from today on we will stay together forever. OK?!” As the further success story of the brand new station for music-loving German youth would show, the concept of relying on approachability instead of professionalism was a complete success.
Until the end of the millennium, VIVA remained a fixture in the German media landscape and sent its presenters around the world with almost unlimited budgets to conduct chaotic interviews with the superstars of the music scene at the time. On the first wave of success, the VIVA makers founded VIVA Zwei in 1995, another station that was aimed at an older audience and instead of “hits and fun” provided background information and music videos about alternative rock bands.
Unglamorous decline from the turn of the millennium
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, VIVA had passed its peak. In 2004, the station was taken over by the American media group Viacom, which also owned its major competitor MTV. Until its sad end in 2018, the station became increasingly irrelevant, especially due to the triumph of the Internet.
Most recently, VIVA shared the broadcast slot with the comedy channel Comedy Central and, as former presenter Klaas Heufer-Umlauf puts it, was just “like a corpse in the corner”. In the last broadcast on December 31, 2018, the remaining handful of presenters finally said “See you on Viva” to an audience that has now long disappeared and finally showed the first video that was shown on the screen at the start of the broadcast in 1993: “Too cool for this world” by the Fantastischen Vier.
All three parts of “The VIVA Story – too cool for this world!” will be available from December 1, 2023 in the ARD media library and on ardkultur.de. The documentary can be seen on TV on January 6th, 2024 at 9:45 p.m. on WDR and on January 16th, 2023 at 10:25 p.m. on 3sat.