Documentary romances: The lovestruck farmers: anniversary of “Farmer is looking for a wife”

A minister called the program “nonsense”, and the presenter was afraid at the beginning: Nevertheless, “Farmer Seeks a Woman” has become a phenomenon. The 20th season is now running. Time for a review.

Things often turn out differently than you think, that’s the case in love and also in work. When Inka Bause was invited to dinner by an RTL employee more than 20 years ago and he suggested a program to her, it wasn’t one she would have expected. “I actually come from a completely different place. I come from music and have hosted shows,” says Bause. Now she was supposed to help farmers, often with a broad dialect and a penchant for sausage sandwiches, to find a wife somewhere in Lower Saxony or northern Hesse.

Today, almost 50 babies were born from this program – RTL counted it. “Farmer Seeks Woman” was the name of the format, which has been more or less successfully pairing up farmers (and, since 2009, farmers’ women) for around two decades. And that is now celebrating an anniversary: ​​The 20th season begins on RTL on Monday (September 30th, 8:15 p.m., on RTL+). At the beginning, hardly anyone would have believed that it would last this long.

Moderator Inka Bause, who is still there, also remembers a certain – well – tension in the first few days. Or as she puts it: “At the beginning I was really scared.” If you watch the first seasons, you can feel that too. “There I was in the yard with such grumpy guys and I knew: If they, who come from the big city, don’t accept me here, they’ll throw me out.”

“Barn Festival” and “Farm Week”

The format, which RTL classifies as belonging to the “Lovetainment” genre, was originally based on a British original (“Farmer Wants a Wife”). It was first broadcast in Germany on October 2, 2005.

It is now so well known that anyone who has ever been near the RTL button on their remote control should know the words “Barn Festival” and “Hofwoche”. Also because Bause’s farmers radiated far beyond their homesteads from the start – there was criticism, a lot of satirical humor, heartbreak stories and even successes in the charts.

The process: In a kind of pilot episode, farmers who are looking for love are introduced. Afterwards, letters arrive from potential applicants. The farmers then select candidates from these who they invite to the “barn festival”. Anyone who can succeed there is allowed to come to the farm – sometimes just one candidate, sometimes several. However, the latter variant often turns out to be quite tricky.

During the “Farm Week”, the farmer and the chosen ones finally go about their everyday work together. Scenes from pigsties or wooden farm kitchens are often accompanied by a rather flowery commentary using Rosamunde Pilcher vocabulary, which contrasts with the sometimes shown clumsiness of the love-crazed farmers.

A randomly picked example: Pig farmer Torsten sits at the snack in the second season and philosophizes in front of candidate Daniela (a “hobby esotericist” according to RTL) for what feels like ages about the greatness of minced meat: “For me, minced meat requires a fresh onion, which I “I’m just cutting it myself. That it’s not old yet… And um, for me it’s practically like schnitzel with fries.”

Inka Bause says from the off: “Minced meat with onions as a feast. Did Daniela imagine the first meal together differently?” That sounds nice. And at the same time quite threatening.

Inka Bause gets a red neck

After the start, the German Farmers’ Association, among others, was outraged. “The series conveys the image of the awkward farmer,” criticized a spokesman at the time in 2005. Many farmers complained. In 2007, the then Federal Minister of Agriculture Horst Seehofer (CSU) added: The program was completely unrealistic. His verdict in an interview with Hit-Radio Antenne Niedersachsen: “From my point of view, it’s nonsense.”

Inka Bause, on the other hand, can also get angry if you ask her about it. “I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t understand that we’re not making a journalistic show. We’re making entertainment and not a documentary about rural life,” she says. “If a chubby farmer really wants to go to the wellness area with his wife, we organize it so that we can get realistic pictures and fulfill his wish at the same time,” she explains. But don’t force it and don’t show anyone off.

Listen to what the farmers have in mind. And then it is also the “wellness temple”. “He had never been in a jacuzzi before. But he wanted to be filmed lying in a jacuzzi with a woman,” says Bause. She finds it “repulsive” to react to this by turning up her nose. “It’s making my neck red again.”

She maintains contact with her farmers. Some became very famous, including with their wives. For example, the “pious dairy farmer” Josef and the Thai woman Narumol. Or Shepherd Heinrich, who began his career as a ballermann singer. “If I find out that another barn has burned down, I’ll call him and ask him how he’s doing,” says Bause. He is currently having problems again – with bluetongue disease in his sheep.

dpa

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