In Walhalla it’s hiking day again, and the column saints of German television tell the world how much nicer life used to be. The first thing that happened recently was Harald Schmidt Sunday regulars’ table of the BR as a dissident in the subjunctive. Schmidt said that he did some of what he did at Sat 1 today, that led him out of the studio straight to the penal system. Hugo Egon Balder, in turn, gave that Editorial network Germany an interview, in which the impression was created that the differences between a life on Sat 1 and a life in prison are now marginal anyway. According to Balder, the station is “permanently driven into the grits” by managing directors.
What ideas do the former leaders have of partial retirement?
After all, Stefan Raab, who has escaped the public, remains a phenomenon when it comes to questions of nostalgia, he doesn’t even have to speak to keep reappearing. So he was happy mirror these days on a “Comeback of the cult show” TV totalIn order to give everyone a message about Raab in the opening credits: He wants to produce, he will not moderate himself.
From these collected notes, one can above all learn something about former television leaders and their ideas about partial retirement. But the question also arises as to whether or how much better television used to be, especially the low-threshold one from the We-love-to-entertain-you headquarters at Pro Sieben. Of course there is still good entertainment television and also good staff, including sometimes even station bosses, such as Daniel Rosemann on Sat 1 and Pro Sieben is one of them.
But what feeds nostalgia is something else anyway. It is a not so faint memory of a range and relevance that can hardly exist for a clearly structured German, well: family broadcaster in an atomized, fully digitized and fully globalized media world. The issue of range wasn’t entirely different in the past, but more than just a little. At this point Harald Schmidt should be called to the witness stand again, who once lied merrily as follows, after Sat 1 again with a hiking evening Wandering whore “80 million viewers … we sometimes didn’t have enough Germans to watch this film!”