“Dinner for One”: Miss Sophie’s tiger skin – finally ready for a museum

Year after year, butler James stumbles upon Miss Sophie’s tiger skin in “Dinner for One”. The sketch is completely unknown in England – there the prop was rotting away. Now the tiger should go to the museum. He went through a lot in the process.

“I’m going to kill this wildcat,” scolds butler James, exasperated in the cult sketch “Dinner for One”. Did he mean the tiger skin that he stumbled upon during Miss Sophie’s birthday dinner? In any case, the actor Freddie Frinton would never have dreamed of where this tiger skin would be 50 years after his death: It is waiting in an air-conditioned museum depot in Germany to be transferred to a museum that has yet to be founded in Northern Germany. But one after anonther.

In the 1950s, Frinton roamed the provinces and played in small variety theaters on the south coast of England. One day he accidentally discovered the tiger head with fur on it in the window of a grocery store in Bexhill, describes his widow Nora Harding in newspaper interviews. It seems ideal for the sketch. And so the skin goes on tour – when the car is too full, Frinton straps the tiger onto the roof without further ado, only to trip over it again and again in the evening.

A case for the province on the island

While the short play “Dinner for One” remains a matter for provincial theaters in England, a well-known German showmaster came to a well-known English seaside resort in 1962 and said the play could interest the German audience, recalls the English journalist Mike Peak:

Cult thanks to Frankenfeld

But in Germany the sketch becomes an integral part of the eternal culture of humor. In 1963 Peter Frankenfeld shows the scene for the first time on German television in his program “Guten Abend, Peter Frankenfeld”.

Just five years later, Frinton dies surprisingly at the age of only 59. That is why he can no longer experience the success that “Dinner for One” experienced as an annual cult broadcast on the European continent from the 1970s onwards.

But his widow is surprised that so many people are still laughing about it after so long. And the journalist Peake fears that the audience on the continent thinks the whole thing is typically British humor, while the scene is quite old-fashioned and the “British sense of humor” has a lot more rough edges to offer.

Plush patches on the tiger skin

But back to the tiger skin: In 2013 the journalist Espen Aas, who works for the Norwegian radio in London, is following the tiger’s heels. After some reluctance, Freddie Frinton’s family finally allowed him to visit their home, north of London.

You can clearly see patches of patchwork on the back of the head – where Frinton stumbled over it hundreds of times. And because he couldn’t find a tiger skin back then, he took leopard-print plush. After Espen Aas rediscovered the tiger and his reports, an eventful life began for the dusty prop.

The eye of the tiger

Dorothee Starke, the head of the cultural office in Bremerhaven, is also in contact with Frinton’s relatives. She looked the tiger in the eye and reported:

Bremerhaven is the twin town of Grimsby, an eastern English port city where Frinton was born in 1909. And so things come full circle for the head of the cultural department, Starke: On the initiative of Grimsby, the tiger and other props are to come to Bremerhaven. Because it would be nice if the estate went to Germany, where Frinton’s work is honored in a completely different way than in his English homeland.

After the sketch, the “Dinner for One” show

The Bremerhaven Cultural Office is on fire: a museum with a restaurant and theater is planned. The aim is to show the connection between Frinton, Grimsby and Bremerhaven, the two similar port cities with a comparable past and comparable problems. As a young man, Frinton worked in the fishing port of Grimsby, Bremerhaven had a vaudeville tradition similar to that of the English port cities.

After visiting the museum, visitors should be able to enjoy the “Dinner for One” with mulligatawny soup, port and all the trimmings – and then see a “Dinner for One” show. But until Starke has found the right property and an operator concept, the tiger skin has to wait.

To be shown in museums is nothing new for the tiger: two years ago it was shown in the “Very British” exhibition in the House of History in Bonn. There it is now stored in the air-conditioned magazine – almost a bit of luxury for the sturdy wildcat.