Night café (talk show)

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Television series
Original title NIGHT CAFE
Country of production GermanyGermany Germany
Year (s) since 1987
length 90 minutes
Broadcasting
cycle		 weekly
genre Talk show
Director Michael Maschke, Wolfgang Rommel, Karsten Frings, Christian Kapp
Moderation
First broadcast February 14, 1987 on Südwest 3

Nachtcafé (own spelling: NACHTCAFÉ ) is a talk show on SWR television . The show reaches up to one million viewers nationwide. Airtime is Friday evening, 10:00 p.m.

Moderators

The show has been moderated by Wieland Backes since its first episode on February 14, 1987 . Backes welcomed over 5,000 guests in a total of 706 episodes. On January 29, 2014, Backes announced that he would hand over the show at the end of 2014. This announcement came through an exclusive interview with the Stuttgarter Zeitung . Backes emphasized that he wanted to choose the time to say goodbye to the night café himself, which is why he decided to take this step "at the height of success". He hosted his last issue on December 12, 2014. This program, entitled “Happy End”, featured Baden-Württemberg's Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann , entertainer Harald Schmidt and singer and actress Ute Lemper as guests. Backes continued to host the guess show I have a big name until 2019 , which is also broadcast on SWR television.

Michael Steinbrecher has been moderating the show as Backes' successor since January 2015 . Steinbrecher started his career as a television presenter in the talk show sector back in 1987. For a total of around five years, he initially moderated the youth talk “Doppelpunkt” on ZDF. The Dortmund native then switched to the current sports studio (also on ZDF), which he moderated from 1992 to 2013. Steinbrecher also holds a professorship for television and cross-media journalism at the Technical University of Dortmund. The change in moderator was largely received positively by the audience and critics. The Stuttgarter Zeitung described Steinbrecher as a “cautious innovator”.

Location

The talk show was initially recorded in Schloss Favorite in Ludwigsburg . The building was built between 1717 and 1723 as a small pleasure and hunting palace within sight of the baroque residential palace. Since 2015 the night café has been broadcast from the old E-Werk in Baden-Baden , where the SWR talk show People of the Week was also produced. The building was constructed in 1899 and later converted into a studio.

concept

The night café , founded by Wieland Backes, was one of the first thematic talk shows on German television. The topics of the program come from the social field, the focus is on family, relationships, but also socio-political issues. Six to eight guests are interviewed individually and brought into conversation with one another. Celebrity guests often speak on a topic that they are not directly associated with in public. These included the former Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer , actresses such as Iris Berben and Ruth Maria Kubitschek, and publicists such as Hellmuth Karasek and Henryk M. Broder . Celebrities and unknown people take part in the roundtable discussion in the night café on an equal footing and exchange their points of view on the discussed topic. The latter are self-researched stories by people, most of whom are seen and heard on television for the first time. As a rule, there is also an expert in the discussion who can, for example, contribute to the discussion with scientific background knowledge. In addition, there are short films and photos of individual guests or as a content impulse for the discussion.

Up until December 2014, every edition of the night café began with a so-called “bar talk”. This consisted of a one-on-one interview with a guest, who usually did not later sit in the discussion group, and served to introduce the respective program topic. With the change of moderator and the move to a new studio in early 2015, this element was eliminated. Instead, one-on-one interviews are woven into a night café broadcast at different times . In addition, some interviewees are only brought into the discussion later. The current moderator Michael Steinbrecher said in several interviews that discussions would also be conceivable in the future, in which fewer talk guests than usual would be invited in order to be able to discuss their stories in more depth and in more detail. In addition, it is conceivable to make the night café into a meeting point for viewers beyond the 90-minute broadcast time. The editorial team of the show also offers background information on the respective program topic on the Nachtcafé homepage . In addition, since 2015 the program has been focusing more on topicality in order to be close to current events with the selection of topics. An example of this is the episode “Torn from Life” on March 27, 2015 on the occasion of the crash of a Germanwings aircraft in the French Alps a few days earlier. The program dealt with the fate of people who were also endangered by an accident or lost relatives. The broadcast was created within 48 hours.

As of March 24, 2020 [obsolete] , the night café will be part of the TALK talk series on Tuesday , which will be broadcast weekly on Tuesdays from 10:45 pm on the Erste . Three new episodes are planned by June 2020 [obsolete] and will continue to be broadcast on Friday evening on SWR television.

Trivia

It was part of Wieland Backes' qualities as a night café moderator that he ended each issue with a quote that was appropriate to the topic, usually from a writer or philosopher. These were also published in a collected form in two volumes as a book.

In Wieland Backes' last night café edition “Happy End”, in addition to the announced talk guests, the director Dieter Wedel also had a surprise appearance . Wedel was a guest on a show on affair in 1999 and left the show angry after he was approached by another guest in the group about his private life.

Michael Steinbrecher's first TV format Doppelpunkt on ZDF started in the same year as the Nachtcafé with Wieland Backes.

Awards

Wieland Backes received the following awards for individual programs from the Nachtcafé :

Reviews

According to the weekly newspaper Die Zeit (from May 31, 2000), Wieland Backes has become the "uncrowned king of high-level talk" with his talk show Nachtcafé .

literature

  • Wieland Backes: Stories from the night café . Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 978-3898500722 .
  • Wieland Backes: The Night Cafe Quote Book . Hohenheim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3898501941 .
  • Michael Steinbrecher: Night Café: Turning Points - When everything suddenly changes . Klöpfer & Meyer Verlag, Tübingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-86351-428-0 .
  • Sabine Hipp: Analysis of a German talk show classic (AM06): Origin, development and success of the SWR show Nachtcafé . 2006 (university thesis)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b The night café: A talk classic . on 3sat.de
  2. ↑ Joachim Dorfs: At the height of success. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , January 29, 2014, interview; accessed on November 27, 2015.
  3. ^ Ariane Holzhausen: Interview with Michael Steinbrecher. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , September 10, 2015, interview; accessed on November 27, 2015.
  4. ↑ derwesten.de: Michael Steinbrecher - That is why he reforms the night café interview; accessed on December 1, 2015.
  5. ↑ Internet presence of the program on the SWR homepage , accessed on December 1, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Night Café" - TALK on Tuesday - ARD. Retrieved December 23, 2019 .