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"Same Procedure as Every Year!"


Our four years spent in Germany (1991-1995) introduced us to many cultural oddities, the oddest of which was the Germans' love of a short little 18-minute black-and-white vaudville comedy sketch that was filmed in English in the early sixties in front of a live audience. It gets broadcast on TV on New Year's Eve and at least in the Stuttgart area everything came to a halt for 18 minutes.

Our family caught it by accident that first New Year's Eve in 1991, on Stuttgart's Südwest Drei German TV station. We learned about this cultural phenomenon after the fact, asking about the show we had seen. The next New Year's Eve we planned our time and watched it in its entirety. The THIRD year we video-taped it (in PAL format rather than NTSC; we had a dual-mode TV that could receive German TV in PAL and American AFN TV in NTSC, but we also had a dual-mode VCR that could convert from one to the other). We brought the NTSC copy back to the states with us to play for friends and family each New Year's Eve, eventually converting it to DVD. We play it every year.

From Wikipedia:

Dinner for One, also known as The 90th Birthday, or by its corresponding German alternative title, Der 90. Geburtstag, is a two-hander comedy sketch written by British author Lauri Wylie for the theatre. German television station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) recorded a performance of the piece in 1963, in its original English language, with a short introduction in German. This comedy sketch went on to become the most frequently repeated TV programme ever.

The 18-minute single-take black-and-white 1963 TV recording featuring British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden has become an integral component of the New Year's Eve schedule of several German television stations. Versions of the sketch are also shown by Danish and Swedish channels; it is a December 23 staple on Norwegian national television, and a cult television classic in Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, the Faroe Islands and Austria; on New Year's Eve 2003 alone, the sketch was broadcast 19 times (on various channels). As of 2005, the sketch had been repeated more than 230 times. It is famous in other countries as well — including German-speaking Switzerland and South Africa. It is likewise broadcast at New Year in Australia on SBS.

The sketch presents the 90th birthday of upper-class Englishwoman Miss Sophie, who hosts a celebration dinner every year for her friends Mr Pomeroy, Mr Winterbottom, Sir Toby, and Admiral von Schneider. ... The problem is that due to Miss Sophie's considerable age, she has outlived all of her friends, and so her equally aged manservant James makes his way around the table, impersonating each of the guests in turn. Miss Sophie decides on appropriate drinks to accompany the menu: Mulligatawny soup (Miss Sophie orders dry sherry), North Sea haddock (with white wine), chicken (with champagne), and fruit for dessert (with port) served by James, who finds himself raising (and emptying) his glass four times per course. That takes its toll, increasingly noticeable in James's growing difficulty in pouring the drinks, telling wine glasses from vases of flowers, and refraining from bursting into song.

The crucial exchange during every course is:

James: "The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?"
Miss Sophie: "The same procedure as every year, James!"

 

You can walk up to any German and out of the blue say, as a question, in English; "The same procedure as last year?" and 99 times out of a hundred you'll get the correct reply, in English, as an immediate response!

 

By now you're probably quite curious to see this odd little video for yourself. You're in luck! YouTube has a number of copies and related videos for your viewing pleasure and amusement (some with short intro advertisements or removable advertisement bars across the bottom):

 

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