Dinner for One (1963)

Directed by

Heinz Dunkhase

Genre

comedy film

Country

Germany

Runtime

18 min

Rated

0

Rating

7.3 of 10 from 197 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

An elderly woman celebrates her 90th birthday with dinner and her butler. She has a conversation with each of her four imaginary friends, and the butler drinks their wine in their place. The sketch follows them through multiple courses as the butler gets increasingly drunk.

slapstickwhimsicallightheartedrepetitivetheatricaldrynostalgicabsurd

What happens

Dinner for One, also known as The 90th Birthday (German: Der 90. Geburtstag), is a television comedy sketch that is repeated every New Year's Eve in several European countries. The two-hander sketch was originally written by British author Lauri Wylie for the theatre. After featuring on the stage, the German TV broadcaster, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), recorded the sketch in 1963 as an 18-minute black-and-white videotape recording, performed in English by British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden. The sketch begins with an introduction in German, followed by the main act in English, and is available online. It has become traditional viewing on New Year's Eve in countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia. In Norway it is broadcast on 23 December. As of 1995 it was the most frequently repeated television programme in Germany. Despite originating as a British stage sketch, the TV version gained only limited recognition in the UK over 50 years after its recording. It was broadcast on New Year's Eve in Britain on Sky Arts from 2018 to 2020. In other parts of the world, the sketch is broadcast in Australia and South Africa. Apart from a few satires, Dinner for One is not known in the United States, where the comic premise had already been made famous by Red Skelton and Lucille Ball. In 2003, Danish TV producer Paul Anthony Sørensen directed and produced a documentary about the sketch that includes interviews with relatives of Freddie Frinton and May Warden. It was nominated for the Rose d'Or 2004. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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