‘Dinner for One’: the British movie millions of Germans watch every New Year
During World War II, German soldier Peter Frankenfeldt was shot in the foot by a Russian sniper. When his surgeon accused him of trying to desert the army, he called the man “a goddamn Nazi asshole” and was, not surprisingly, left to deal with his injury on his own. When another medical team finally saw him, his wound had become so infected that his leg was nearly amputated. Frankenfeldt might not have known it at the time, but if it hadn’t been for this experience, he would never have won the rights to the British sketch ‘Dinner for One’ decades later or turned it into the film that holds the Guinness World Record for ‘most repeated TV programme in history’.
Frankenfeldt had been a popular comedian before being sent to the front and often found himself in hot water with the Nazi government. After the war, his popularity grew. Living in West Germany, he worked as an interpreter for the US and then embarked on a career in radio. In addition to performing his own sketches and hosting quiz shows, he enjoyed scoping out new talent. In 1962, he travelled to Blackpool to investigate its burgeoning comedy scene and instantly became obsessed with one performance.
British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden were appearing in a sketch they’d written called ‘Dinner for One’. In it, Frinton plays a butler named James who throws a 90th birthday party for his employer, Miss Sophie, played by Warden. She wants to enjoy a meal with her four closest friends. Unfortunately, they are all dead, so James stands in for all of them, growing progressively drunk as he tries to consume the requisite amount of food and alcohol for four people.
Frankenfeldt loved the sketch and wanted to take it to Germany. The only trouble was that Frinton despised the Nazis and wasn’t about to let a former German soldier abscond with his material. That’s where the story of the nearly amputated leg came in. Anyone willing to call a scalpel-wielding henchman of Hitler a “goddamn Nazi asshole” was good enough for the Englishman, and Frankenfeldt was given the rights to the sketch. He even managed to get Frinton and Warden to travel to Germany to reprise their roles.
Filmed in Hambourg in 1963, Dinner for One is a mere 18 minutes long and extremely outdated even by 1960s standards, but when a German television channel started playing it every New Year’s Eve starting in 1972, it became a holiday staple watched by millions of German, Swiss, and Scandinavian viewers every year. Its popularity is hard to pin down. It’s low-budget, black-and-white, and in English. It’s so mannered and old-fashioned that it’s hard to imagine UK viewers going crazy for it, let alone European ones.
However, its quintessentially British slapstick humour clearly struck a chord. According to The Guardian, more than 12million Germans watched Dinner for One in 2017, when it was shown no fewer than a dozen times across various public TV channels in the country on New Year’s Eve between 10:30 in the morning and just before midnight.
It wasn’t until 2018 that this painfully British comedy made its way onto UK televisions. Four years later, it still shows no sign of catching on in the country, even as German and Scandinavian audiences continue to gather around their screens for an annual tradition more than five decades in the making.
