# New Year's Eve: Dinner For One



## David Baxter PhD (Dec 31, 2010)

*The Mystery of Dinner for One*
By Jude Stewart, _Slate Magazine_
Dec. 30, 2005

_How an obscure British skit has become Germany's most popular New Year's tradition_



Every New Year's Eve, half of all Germans plunk down in front of their televisions to watch a 1963 English comedy sketch called _Dinner for One_. Walk into any bar in Bavaria and shout the film's refrain: "The same procedure as last year, madam?" The whole crowd will shout back in automatic, if stilted, English: "The same procedure as _every_ year, James." Even though _Dinner for One _is, according to the _Guinness Book of World Records,_ the most frequently repeated TV program ever, it has never been aired in the United Kingdom or the United States, and most of the English-speaking world is ignorant of its existence. When _Der Spiegel_ probed the mystery last New Year's, it found that the BBC had not only never contemplated broadcasting this veddy British nugget in the United Kingdom, the BBC's spokesperson had never even heard of it.

_Dinner for One_, also known as _Der 90 Geburtstag_ (_The 90th Birthday_), has rattled around the cabaret circuit for decades. Written by British author Lauri Wylie in the 1920s, it presents a morbidly funny story in miniature—(just 11 minutes on TV): Elderly Miss Sophie throws her birthday party every year, setting the table for her friends Sir Toby, Mr. Pommeroy, Mr. Winterbottom, and Adm. von Schneider, while conveniently ignoring the fact that they've all been dead for a quarter-century. Her butler James manfully takes up the slack by playacting all of them. He serves both drinks and food while quaffing toasts on behalf of each "guest," a bevy of soused British noblemen and von Schneider, who toasts Miss Sophie with a heel-click and a throaty "Sk?l!" James waddles to and fro, trips repeatedly over the head of a tiger-pelt rug, declaims each guest's pleasantries boozily, spray-fires the table with mispoured drinks, and downs a little water from a flower vase. Each course begins with the signature refrain: "The same procedure as last year, madam?" "The same procedure as _every_ year, James." The sketch ends with James' final "procedure": bedding the old lady himself.

In 1962, German entertainer Peter Frankenfeld stumbled on _Dinner for One_ in Blackpool's seaside circuit. Frankenfeld was so charmed that he invited actors Freddie Frinton and May Warden to perform the sketch on his live TV show _Guten Abend_,_ Peter Frankenfeld_. The now-classic black-and-white recording dates from a 1963 live performance in Hamburg's Theater am Besenbinderhof. (So deep runs the love for this broadcast that last year _Frankfurter Rundschau_ interviewed a woman whose piercing laugh from the sidelines has achieved its own cult status.) Audiences clamored for repeats, and the skit fit nicely as a time-filler between larger broadcasts, so the German network Norddeutscher Rundfunk and its affiliates ran the snippet repeatedly in the 1960s, even reaching audiences behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. The skit settled into its current New Year's Eve slot in 1972. 

The show's popularity spread to Scandinavia, where it is typically watched on December 23, as well as Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, Australia, and Latvia. The show has been broadcast more than 230 times. You can watch it dubbed in Plattdeutsch, a northern German dialect (with or without a German introduction), ponder its scholarly depths in a Latin translation, take in live _Dinner for One_ supper theater, cook up Miss Sophie's traditional meal, or just drink briskly along with the actors, and the rest of northern Europe. There are many parodies as well: My favorite is the childrens' public TV station KI.KA's _Dinner f?r Brot_, featuring a puppet shaped like a roll of bread as James. 

But why? How did a sliver of British humor come to dominate another culture's holidays—with apparently no connective thread back to its source? First, the slapstick of _Dinner for One _transcends the language barrier. Second, it offers a slight thrill of the _verboten_: After all, it features a very crazy old lady, a bevy of lecherous male friends, a big stench of post-WWII death, a hell of a lot of drinking, and senior-citizen sex. A third notion, floated by _Der Spiegel_ and the _Guardian_ alike last year, is that the film plays to Germans' worst idea of the British upper class: dotty, pigheadedly traditional, forever marinated in booze despite titles. The BBC counters with the more politic theory that _Dinner for One_ "has become synonymous with British humor, on a par with _Mr. Bean_." British TV executives see it as fit only for foreigners, or they would rush to broadcast it themselves. Why Germany finds it so funny and the British don't is, according to _Der Spiegel_'s Sebastian Knauer, "one of the last unsolved questions of European integration." 
But the biggest reason for _Dinner for One_'s popularity, I suspect, is the magic of repetition. The skit is mildly funny, sure, but much more important is that it has the mysterious quality of something that could get _very_ funny after years of drunken viewing. The script itself, so laden with repetition, lodges in the brain and accretes in-jokes easily. (Like _The Rocky Horror Picture Show _or _Showgirls_, which have achieved bad-is-good popularity through repetition, _Dinner for One _has a bad little kernel of a story and a crass creepiness.) And in a modern Germany many feel is teetering into economic free fall, a comfortable old-time ritual has an almost religious attraction. 

Best of all, _Dinner for One _is a perfect foundation for a tidy drinking game in which you down four different liquors in 11 minutes, "the same procedure as_ every_ year." What more fitting way to ring in the New Year?


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## gooblax (Jan 1, 2011)

And here I thought this thread was going to be a commentary on the "wonderful" meal I cooked up for myself last night - mostly cooked spaghetti, not completely drained of cool water, laying on a bed of incompletely melted mozzarella and parmesan cheese, accompanied by some leftover salad.


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