German Television and Presentation

I'm sure I remember in the late 90's German channels such as Pro Sieben were chopping off the end credits of some of their programmes and just had a voice over with a scrolling message and the theme song playing in the background before going in to the next programme.

I’m glad you mentioned Denn Sie Wissen Nicht, Was Passiert. We were in Paris at the end of August last year and flicking thrilled channels and were utterly engrossed by it. It seemed like a show that was a hangover from British TV game shows in the 90s; lots of fun and light-hearted, even though we don’t speak German. It did seem like it was on for about 4 hours though. Is it popular in Germany?

These 4+ hour game shows must be unique to Germany? I don't think I've seen them elsewhere. They're very odd in that they almost feel like you're watching a studio record of a pre-recorded programme given that you constantly see set changes and there's frequent long pauses that just would never get from a British live show.

Does anyone know the history of these shows? They always seem to be on a Saturday night and never have a set end time. My daft theory is that they were almost designed to be dipped into, i.e. you only pay attention when the actual game's on. The bits in between you can chat with friends and family in your room/other general Saturday night indoors stuff while you wait for the next round?!

They also don't seem to air weekly - they'll just air an episode every month or so.

I think both Spain and Italy have fairly long entertainment shows, but probably around the two hour mark rather than four.

Those shows are generally called "Samstagabendshow" (literally "Saturday Evening Show") and are a staple of German Television. They date back to the 60s when the whole family would watch TV together and, as @gottago mentioned, there was loads of discussion and speculation happening in front of the screen as well.

German Wikipedia has a whole article about these types of shows with some example shows and DeepL does a very decent job of translating it into English:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samstagabendshow

The most notable show of this kind would be "Wetten dass ...?" which ran for 23 years and was notorious for going over the time. According to teh Wiki the record is 73 minutes.

Another notable one was Schlag den Raab, which was one of the more recent ones and one of the last shows that I remeber where you acutally had a Family TV Evenening, with everbody watching together. It's also notable that it had one episode run for 6 hours and 11 minutes

I've always been fascinated by the fact that live German TV shows get allocated, say, two and a half hours, and then just spontaneously go over it pretty much on a whim and nobody gives a monkeys about this should have wrapped half an hour ago or about whatever was supposed to be following in the schedule, and yet the networks are happy to allow this to happen.

Realistically its one thing if sport overruns (such as if a cup final goes into extra time and that wasn't factored into the schedule), but its something else if Wetten Dass spontaneously decide they'll just keep going.

Since we're talking about German game shows (and as I already wrote in The Masked Singer UK thread), here's some fact: all episodes of the German version of The Masked Singer on ProSieben were presented live for hours.

Yes, even during lockdown they did the show live, with fake crowd noise and everything.

Both those shows ended up being made for the UK, but unlike German Television, ours were pre-recorded.

Wetten Dass?
Became You Bet (less the long celeb interviews and pop music performances)

Schlag Den Raab, was renamed as Beat The Star.

The first series was made on the German set of Schlag Den Rabb using the German crew at Brainpool Studios in Cologne, and despite being pre-recorded, with full English speaking audience, was directed and edited to look 'as live'.

Unlike Schlag Den Raab, where the aim was to beat Stefan Raab, in ours it was different star each week with series host Vernon Kay being the 'star' in the last show of each run.

Second series was made at Pinewood Studios, and suffered from too many repeated games and brutal editing loosing that loose and live feeling of the Pro7 original.

You may detect I'm a great fan of Schlag Den Raab.
Using the dark arts of the Internet I watched many episodes live - and can attest to still watching one edition after midnight UK time!

Via a sponsor, Raab TV are uploading each past edition of SdR to You Tube currently and premiering on Saturday evenings.

The live part of Masked Singer made it much more exciting than any of the other versions in my opinion. Especially as it meant that telephone voting from the public could be used each week for who survived. I believe the Austrian version was also live for its first series, but will be pre-recorded for the next one. The German version will remain live, which I think is definitely the right choice.

Even when entertainment shows aren't live, they're often much longer than they'd ever be on British TV, taking up a good few hours of the evening.

Sat.1's new show 'Die Festspiele Der Reality Stars' began tonight. They've had good success this year with their reality 'Trash TV' formats, and so I expect they're hoping this entertainment show variation does well too.

(As a note, I also like how trailers for german tv shows tell you what the music is they're using too - I assume another source of income for the channel)

I’ve got the Landesschau jingle in my head now, and it’s this thread’s fault.

https://youtu.be/XIPzHhlE2_A

Get that out of your heads, it’s even better than the modern version! Proper ear worm before bed.

I still find it amazing that the regional broadcasters produce as much content as they do. Four-six radio stations and two TV channels is a lot.

Is it a music rights thing? I'm fairly sure I've seen German ads doing it too.