Pascal Bastien for The New York Times
Stupid German Tricks, Wearing Thin on TV
By NICHOLAS KULISH
OFFENBURG, Germany — Since a tragic accident on a variety show, Germans
are wondering why their country has fallen behind in producing quality
television.
Pascal Bastien for The New York Times
The popular, long-running
German TV show “Wetten, Dass . . . ?,” in which contestants accept wacky
challenges, is facing criticism both regarding the show itself and what
it says about the national culture.
By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: January 30, 2013
OFFENBURG, GERMANY — The black telescoping arm of the
Supertechno 30 camera crane swooped over the live television audience,
as the scent of pyrotechnics from a Swedish band’s performance lingered
in the air. The Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington watched as
a German man wearing goggles stuck his finger in a bottle and made a
popping sound.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Pascal Bastien for The New York Times
Celebrities like Denzel Washington make guest
appearances on the show, in which winners could depart with a new car —
or serious injuries.
Pascal Bastien for The New York Times
The new host of “Wetten, Dass . . . ?,” Markus Lanz.
Pascal Bastien for The New York Times
Mr. Washington making a guest appearance on the show.
Mr. Washington clapped and offered encouragement as though he was back
on the sidelines in “Remember the Titans.” He was urging on a young
Bavarian, Bernhard Siegel, who was trying to guess from the plunking sound alone how much water was in a series of bottles, for glory, fleeting fame and the chance to win a brand-new car.
It was a recent Saturday night, and Mr. Washington, there to promote the
film “Flight,” had entered the very German universe of “Wetten, Dass
...?,” a variety show with some 10 million viewers often referred to as
the biggest television program in Europe. In more than three decades it
has anchored itself in the German consciousness even as viewership has
declined and criticism has risen, not just about the show but also about
what it represents.
Something of an amalgam of “The Tonight Show,” “Saturday Night Live” and
“Battle of the Network Stars,” “Wetten, Dass ...?” — which loosely
translates as “Want to bet that ...?” — began in February 1981, and the
format, in which everyday people compete to execute strange “bets,” or
feats, has changed little. Those wacky challenges, what David Letterman
might call “Stupid Human Tricks,” remain the heart of a show that is a
beloved but perpetually struggling German institution.
“Some people say that if anything could survive a nuclear strike, it
would be cockroaches and ‘Wetten, Dass ...?,’ ” said its host, Markus
Lanz, in an interview after the show wrapped. That survival has
frequently been called into question recently. A handsome 43-year-old
talk-show host, Mr. Lanz took over the show at a moment of crisis.
“Wetten, Dass ...?” narrowly avoided cancellation after a tragic
incident played out live. In December 2010 Samuel Koch, a young man on
spring-loaded stilts, fell while jumping over an Audi driven by his
father and was paralyzed from the neck down in front of millions of
viewers.
The show’s longtime and popular host, Thomas Gottschalk, quickly
announced that the night’s program would be suspended. During the next
show he said that he would resign. Many thought the combination of the
accident and his departure would spell the end of “Wetten, Dass ...?”
Complicating matters further, the leading German newsmagazine, Der
Spiegel, reported last month that Mr. Gottschalk’s brother may have had
questionable business dealings with several companies whose products
appeared on the show. That could amount to inappropriate advertising on
state television. One of those products was Audi, whose cars were used
as prizes and in the catastrophic gambit that paralyzed the young man.
“Wetten, Dass ...?” is not produced by a private television network but
by ZDF, one of the two main public stations, similar to the BBC in
Britain. In 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available,
German public television and radio received over $10 billion in
licensing fees from viewers and listeners. Now the system is changing,
and all households will have to contribute.
The hoary old show finds itself in the middle of a nationwide debate
over whether the public is getting its money’s worth. “They hardly ever
come up with anything that validates all the money pumped into this
system,” said Marc Felix Serrao, a journalist with the newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung.
It’s all part of a larger soul searching over why Germany, with great
traditions in literature, theater and film, has mostly missed the
current wave of challenging, complex television. Der Spiegel asked in
its latest issue, “Why are Germans the only ones sleeping through the
future of TV?” The magazine called German programs “fainthearted,
harmless, placebo television.”
“Wetten, Dass ...?” has been swept up in the debate over the content of
public television shows. “On the one hand, they are supposed to produce
artistically outstanding programs because that legitimizes funding and
the reason for having public-service broadcasters,” said Dominik Graf, a
director whose series about the Russian mafia in Berlin, “Im Angesicht
des Verbrechens” (“In the Face of Crime”), is often compared to “The
Wire.” “But on the other hand, the functionaries at film funds only talk
about the viewership figures.”
The German television landscape is filled with reality shows including
modeling and singing competitions. Newspapers meticulously track the
goings-on in the jungle camp on the celebrity “Survivor” show “I’m a
Star, Get Me Out of Here.” But the loudest criticism is usually reserved
for “Wetten, Dass ...?”
The broadsides reflect “disappointed love” from a generation weaned on
the program, said Matthias Kalle, deputy editor in chief of the magazine
at the weekly Die Zeit.
At its peak “Wetten, Dass ...?” could attract an almost unthinkable 23
million viewers. The popular coming-of-age novel “Generation Golf,” by
Florian Illies, begins with a 12-year-old boy in a bathtub, looking
forward to watching the show that night. “Never again in later years
would one have such a safe feeling of doing exactly the right thing at
the right time,” Mr. Illies writes.
Mr. Gottschalk began hosting in 1987 and established himself as one of
biggest stars in Germany. With his frizzy blond mullet and outlandish
suits he brought the off-kilter vibe of a Mad Hatter and the
eccentricity of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka to a mainstream television
show. By contrast many critics have described Mr. Lanz as a dutiful,
hardworking schoolboy.
Judged solely by the number of live audience members avidly taking
photos, the show still has a strong pulse. “I find the way he does it
quite positive,” Bernd Ruhlich, 47, said of Mr. Lanz. Mr. Ruhlich came
with his wife, Beate, and their two children to watch the January
edition of the show. (The show appears about seven times a year.)
The producers don’t make it easy on themselves. Instead of presenting
the program on the same soundstage, it’s a roadshow. A crew of about 250
workers must build the set anew — complete with 35 trucks filled with
speakers, lights and dressing rooms — in locations all over Germany and
even abroad. The show is co-produced by ORF, the Austrian public
broadcaster, and has also been staged in Majorca, Spain.
The latest stop in this “wandering circus,” in the words of one network
employee, was a convention hall in this southwestern German city.
For English-speaking stars like Mr. Washington, there are translators
talking into an earpiece. Every time he spoke, a disembodied voice
echoed him in German, sometimes declaring “ja” or “nein” when he only
nodded or shook his head.
The show can run longer than three hours. In November the actor Tom
Hanks looked miserable in a hat with cat ears as Mr. Lanz hopped around
him in a potato-sack race. “In the United States if you are on a TV show
that goes for four hours, everybody responsible for that show is fired
the next day,” Mr. Hanks told a radio station.
For Mr. Lanz those comments dealt a serious blow, much dissected in the
German news media. Mr. Washington lampooned the fuss by donning the same
hat before saying that it looked better on Mr. Hanks.
Mr. Washington may have been the biggest star of January’s show, but Mr.
Lanz was the hardest working personality. Over the course of the show
he danced with a male guest in a tutu, lifting him several times. He
competed against an audience member in a memory competition — while both
pulled on a rowing machine — and won. A gargantuan contestant even
demonstrated the elbow-drop wrestling move, leaping into the air and
falling on a prone Mr. Lanz.
Mr. Lanz and Mr. Washington were joined onstage by a hulking Olympic
discus gold medalist, a legend in the skiing-and-shooting biathlon and
several German film and television stars. On a giant screen overhead a
montage of movie clips showed the young film star Matthias Schweighöfer’s bare backside.
Mr. Washington had a film to promote, and there are few better places to
do that in Germany, which is Europe’s largest economy. Mr. Lanz rolled
clips of “Flight,” and Mr. Washington served pretzels to moviegoers at a
nearby theater.
That same night the audience of “Wetten, Dass ...?” watched a young man
execute flips on a treadmill and a masseur identify different massage
oils in front of a flower-power set complete with Volkswagen bus.
Probably the highlight of the evening was a forklift driver and his
partner who picked up tiny two-cent coins using the vehicle’s big metal
forks and then dropped the money into a soda bottle.
“If only the Greeks were so careful with their money,” Mr. Lanz said.
The warehouse workers failed in their bet, getting only three of the
required four coins into the bottle. Mr. Washington helped Mr. Siegel,
the bottle plunker, and latest winner on “Wetten, Dass ...?,” into a
brand-new Audi.
“Everyone knows it, everyone has an opinion about it, so there’s a
tendency to burden the state of ‘Wetten, Dass ...?’ at any given moment
with a lot of meaning,” Mr. Kalle, the Die Zeit editor, said. “But it
keeps going.”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário