Nobody would have expected that: Thomas Gottschalk said goodbye pretty punctually in the last issue of “Wetten,dass..?”.
Bet that’s it now? On November 25th, Thomas Gottschalk (73) hosted the big German Saturday evening show “Wetten,dass..?” one last time. presents. Live from Offenburg, he welcomed numerous celebrities from sports, music and film. Of course, first there was his quasi-patented hello to Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Gottschalk wasn’t the first to be seen, but rather a completely different veteran of German television: Frank Elstner (81). The brain behind “Bet, that…?” sat in the audience and gave his first farewell words to his colleague in a short clip right at the beginning of the show.
Minutes of standing ovation followed when Gottschalk entered the stage. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t a “devotional.” “I’m still alive, I’m not dead yet after this event here,” he joked in a conversation with Matthias Schweighöfer (42), the first guest on Gottschalk’s couch.
Who is Matthias Schweinsteiger?
Matthias Schweinsteiger, like Gottschalk, also became the first betting sponsor and was able to watch as Horst Freckmann from Bochum successfully recognized roosters by crowing. Take That were the first show act to do the honors. After an encore, the hit “Back for Good”, Gottschalk welcomed Bastian Schweinsteiger (39) and his wife, Ana Ivanović (36).
Unfortunately, as betting sponsors for the children’s bet, they were wrong. They believed that 14-year-old Felix Mayr would be able to do a handstand on a skateboard and hit playing cards on Coke bottles with his helmet so that chewy candies placed on them would fall into the bottles. Although he couldn’t win the bet – just barely – there was still thunderous applause from the audience. He will also be able to attend the Austrian Grand Prix (Formula 1) next summer – and Schweinsteiger and Ivanović are donating 79 balls to the boy’s sports club.
Cotton candy and beef
Michaela Frank’s clever dog Amie then managed to correctly recognize numbers written on cards by Take That’s betting sponsors. And then the wait for what was probably the most eagerly awaited performance of the evening by many spectators was over. Pop queen Helene Fischer (39) and rapper Shirin David (28) presented an acclaimed performance of a new version of the mega hit “Atemlos durch die Nacht”. After a quick outfit change, the two of them went to the couch.
There, David in particular opposed the abdicating moderator. He couldn’t tell that she was an opera fan and that she wasn’t a “feminist” either. “Why not? Because I look good? […] As a feminist, we can look good and we can be smart and eloquent and beautiful at the same time. One doesn’t exclude the other,” she explained to loud applause. She was right and he never claimed otherwise, he replied. According to her, Gottschalk once said that influencers didn’t belong on his couch, but she thinks so It’s pretty comfortable there. He in turn explained that he just didn’t understand influencers until now.
Gottschalk had previously tried making cotton candy with Gary Barlow (52), Howard Donald (55) and Mark Owen (51) from Take That and distributing it to the audience. He also welcomed the actor Jan Josef Liefers (59) and his colleague Stefanie Stappenbeck (49). The former had a surprise in store – a short video message from the Rolling Stones.
“You can stop doing that now in the future”
Stappenbeck and Liefers were the sponsors of outside betting in Switzerland. The comedian Hazel Brugger (29) presented the bet, which had already existed in this form 30 years ago. At that time the candidates narrowly failed. Christian Zumbühl and his seven-person team from the Stans-Oberdorf rope pulling club were tasked with pulling a seven-ton rope up a mountain within two minutes. This time it worked without any further problems. With more than 30 seconds remaining, they covered a distance of ten meters.
And of course a forklift bet couldn’t be missed. Michelle Chevalier and Antonia Fleig from Aschaffenburg bet on using two forklifts to plug a charging cable into a socket and connect the cable to a smartphone. One of Gottschalk’s not particularly charming comments after the two didn’t make it: “But of course you rehearsed for a long time for this bet, you can leave that behind in the future.”
Music icon Cher (77) appeared as the third show act with her song “DJ Play A Christmas Song”. She was later allowed to sit next to him when Stappenbeck and Liefers sang “I Got You Babe” – with him on the guitar. In the last bet ever presented by Gottschalk, Julia Reichert from Munich had to recognize five of 216 bets from the past decades that were assigned colored barcodes. It should also state the respective city and date. Reichert successfully met the challenge and ultimately became Gottschalk’s last betting queen with 32 percent of the votes.
Will Thomas Gottschalk overreach? Great, the bet stands!
Then his last minutes had actually come. Gottschalk’s “Wetten, dass…?” farewell was “ultimately not a sad event”. He once again explained his decision to no longer host the show by saying that, on the one hand, he didn’t want anyone to have to explain to him at some point who was actually sitting on his couch as a guest. On the other hand, he wanted to avoid “shitstorms”. He came from a different time, as he suggested.
Gottschalk thanked the audience and Elstner, the “father of ‘Wetten,dass..?'”, who had “always been like a father” to him. Elstner hugged Gottschalk and didn’t have the feeling that he had been there “at the last show”, but at one “at Thomas Gottschalk’s best time”. To say goodbye, Gottschalk was picked up by his long-time companion Mike Krüger (71) with an excavator and driven out of the studio.
Joko Winterscheidt (44) and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf (40) have to earn their 15 minutes of airtime on ProSieben, long-established presenters like Gottschalk simply take it. In a way, it was always good form for him to say “Wetten, dass…?” to cover. The fact that the moderator’s big “Wetten, dass…?” days are over was probably nowhere better seen than on “heute journal”, because it started almost on time. This would not have happened before at Gottschalk.