Has there ever been a good conversation about Cancel Culture on German TV (or anywhere else)? The attempt usually fails because people want to organize a jumble of words with words, which is just as effective as fighting a hangover with vodka. Or the fact that shitstorms rarely provide sensual imagery. Instead, the rather unspectacular sentences “I was irritated” or “You don’t understand now why it hits you with such force” – sentences like in the first episode of the talk show mind palace on Bavarian Radio. Here too, in the new format of the comedian Oliver Polak, attempts to elucidate anything stimulating on the subject fail. But, and that’s where the beauty of the show comes in: In contrast to the hundred and seventy-five Cancel Culture debates, that’s not a bad thing, something here is easier. What makes Polak different?
First of all, the setting that makes one or the other TV viewer grope for his glasses: A forest at night, wafts of fog creep between pine sprout and bare trunks, a peacock runs through the picture, snarling. And then the host sits there in a rustic wooden chair, wrapped in a monk’s habit, says “Welcome” – that’s it. There are no more crash barriers. That leaves three people on chairs who talk to each other between trees for an hour now. The guests of the first episode can thank God, in which the journalist Yasmine M’Barek and pop singer Patrick Lindner talk to moderator Oliver Polak about “cancel culture”, “loneliness”, “anger” or the keyword “you dog”. In this static performance, the trash bangs in between when the disco ball queen-Song “Flash” shuts down and you fish the next topic of conversation out of the ball. And all the while Patrick Lindner is scratching a dozing puppy on his lap.
There’s finally a bit of avant-garde coming into public law, but in the first episode that’s just fodder for irony
Oliver Polak, the one after the Netflix special Your Life Is A Joke and the video podcast Better than war experimented again with image and sound, explained in an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk that the new show is about diversity. “Maybe that’s why the different costumes, but also the guests. People are often invited because they have this religion, because they have this job, because they have to promote the book.” In fact, the guest list for the five episodes with the linguist and rapper Reyhan Şahin aka Lady Bitch Ray, the trans woman Hana Corrales or the black author Alice Hasters is younger and more diverse than the usual swivel chair cast on German television.
So Polak’s concept: go into the forest and talk. The reversal of all the signs of the show: neither quick-wittedness nor supposedly authentic live experience are categories. And the moderator himself behaves like a host who is still pointing to the refrigerator with his slippers on the TV table: Take what you need and sit down.
He comments on peacock, monk, bird costumes and puppies in advance with a shrugging of the shoulders, just like that. It’s a shame, because there’s finally a bit of avant-garde coming into public law, a bit of “We now need 20 chickens for this Chekhov production” madness à la Frank Castorf, a bit of visual irritation. But then the staging, at least in the first episode, remains more of a meta-jewelry, irony fodder that can be easily commented on, without really following a thought.
Intimate as well as banal ripples gently, there is calm and warmth. And that’s why there’s more
In terms of content, the concept works after the first ten minutes, which the journalist Yasmine M’Barek luckily fills with a hundred clever sentences. You chat about anger (M’Barek: “Anger either clears a blockage or creates a blockage”) or loneliness (Lindner: “It makes me think of Howard Carpendale’s ‘Lonely on Saturday Night'”), none of which has to be funny or original. Pop singer Lindner talks about his coming out or about the feeling of coming into the hotel room alone after a concert in front of a thousand people.
As the understretched talk show host, Polak creates a conversational atmosphere in which both the intimate and the banal murmur happily. But, with all the coziness, wouldn’t it be more interesting to invite people who haven’t already published an autobiography like Lindner? Polak’s format does the right thing, which many talk shows do wrong, in which you put Jan Fleischhauer in the ring next to Sophie Passmann, counting down and then being disappointed that both politely tap each other on the shoulder. in the mind palace doesn’t have to crunch anything. But it’s precisely because of the calm and warmth that you wish people would strike up a conversation that you didn’t expect to get personal. Maybe Henryk M. Broder, with whom you think about loneliness? What is there to fear? There’s the forest. And the puppy.
Palace of Thought, BR, episode one, February 24, 11:15 p.m., and already in the ARD media library.