Saturday night show

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A Saturday evening show is an entertainment program on German-language television that is broadcast on Saturdays, usually from 8.15 p.m. The main thing about it is that it is broadcast live. In a narrower sense, these are programs that, in their classic form, are aimed at a larger audience of different educational levels and age groups and, ideally, can attract a large number of viewers. From the first big Saturday evening shows at the end of the 1950s, the broadcast format experienced its heyday until the beginning of the 1980s and brought real street sweepsoccasionally with audience ratings of 80%. In line with the requirement to serve as many different viewer interests as possible at the same time, typical components of such a program are the full-length juxtaposition of game elements, music performances and discussion groups.

precursor

The "forefather" of the Saturday evening shows was 1-0 for you with Peter Frankenfeld . The program was still broadcast at 8 p.m. It was followed, also with Peter Frankenfeld as moderator, originally on the occasion of the introduction of the postcodes , the program Vergißmeinnicht , although the format of this program corresponded to a Saturday evening show, but was broadcast on Thursday. The same applies to Dalli Dalli with Hans Rosenthal ; first the program was broadcast on Thursday, then on Saturday and finally again on Thursday. The program Der goldene Schuß with Lou van Burg was also very successful, but also initially on Thursdays .

history

The important epoch of Saturday evening shows began in 1964 with one will win under the moderation of Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff . It was followed above all by the Rudi Carrell Show , the Peter Alexander Show , Churning Out , Wetten, dass ..? , The darn 7 , Music trumps , Do you understand fun? and let yourself be surprised . Joachim Fuchsberger moderated The Hot Wire and Let's Go . In addition, there were other shows that often did not have a long broadcast duration due to the low audience figures.

In a television landscape with a manageable number of television channels (and mostly only one television set per household), the program managers assumed that the entire family would watch a program together on Saturday evening and created a format with a cross-generational focus with the Saturday evening show. Attempts were also made to address several educational levels at the same time. The "show acts" of the classic Saturday evening show were therefore extremely diverse and often combined different styles such as folk and pop music. Occasionally, excerpts from operas and operettas were performed. The situation was similar in shows with play elements and / or discussion groups to which "audience favorites" from several age or target groups were invited.

Many of the classic Saturday evening shows were also produced as Eurovision programs in cooperation with ORF and SRG . This was accompanied by a tour-like change of production locations, in which various city and exhibition halls in Germany , Austria and Switzerland as well as West Berlin and South Tyrol were served over the course of a year . Except for short regional windows , mostly at the beginning of a program, the change of the broadcasting locations had little influence on the content of the shows and was only the result of their cross-border financing. The exception was Wetten, dass ..? , in which the local factor in the form of hall and city bets was specifically built into the programs.

The two big Saturday evening shows on GDR television , on the other hand, largely dispensed with a nationwide change of production locations: The program Da geht Musike drin was produced exclusively in Leipzig ; A kettle of color had its real home in East Berlin in the Friedrichstadt-Palast and the Palast der Republik , only a few issues were broadcast as guest performances from other cities such as Dresden or Gera .

Todays situation

The changes in the television landscape in recent decades have almost made the classic Saturday evening show disappear. The reasons for this are a greater density of television sets and the emergence of private and specialty channels. Against the background of this development, the phenomenon of traditional, shared television evenings for the whole family is now only the exception. In addition, the expansion of the program on Saturday evening also means that several casting, ranking and quiz shows broadcast at the same time mean that the character of the one big Saturday evening show as a crowd puller has been lost. In general, television has long ceased to be the only entertainment medium and, particularly since the beginning of the current millennium, it has been given a competitive field of technically comparable quality with PCs, the Internet and home cinema.

The loss of importance of the classic Saturday evening show begins with the widespread distribution of private television from the early 1990s. Formats like dream wedding , does he do it or does he not? or The 100,000 Mark Show took up elements of the public Saturday evening shows and thus took their role models from their previous unique position. In addition, with popular showmasters such as Thomas Gottschalk or Rudi Carrell, a number of previous figureheads switched to the private broadcasters, which were booming at the time. Programs such as Nose Ahead or the former flagship of GDR television, Ein Kessel Buntes , were no longer popular with the public in the larger range of programs and were discontinued due to a lack of quota.

As classic Saturday evening shows with a cross-generational focus, only Wetten Dass ..? and do you understand fun? claim longer term. The disappearance of the evening television evening for the whole family tended to mean that show formats on the Saturday broadcast slot were now less universally oriented and aimed at smaller target groups. An example was the since 1981 initially only by ORF produced Musikantenstadl that in connection with this development for the Euro Visions broadcast and eventually nationwide Saturday night show was also broadcast in Germany. Like the television landscape as a whole, the format of the Saturday evening show became more differentiated and only specialized in part of the audience.

Currently there are only a few Saturday evening shows with the range of earlier decades. Relatively new was the Saturday evening show Schlag den Raab (2006–2015), which was able to build on traditional shows with a market share of 30% and, with some over five hours running time, even went longer than traditional programs. Just like comparable formats in advertising-financed television , Schlag den Raab waived the additional cost factor of a roadshow . Instead, the shows were each produced in the same Brainpool studio complex in Cologne-Mülheim . An innovation that fee-financed channels like SWR and programs like Understanding Fun? now also have it produced en bloc in a permanent studio.

Current Saturday evening shows

Former Saturday night shows

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nobody will win . Der Spiegel from November 5, 1990, spiegel.de, accessed on August 3, 2017.
  2. ↑ "The worm must taste" , Der Spiegel from October 15, 1990, spiegel.de, accessed on August 3, 2017.
  3. ↑ Daniel Sallhoff "rate check Schlag den Raab" , quotenmeter.de of 21 December 2015 called on August 4, 2017
  4. ↑ SWR press release of October 24, 2014 , SWR.de, accessed on August 3, 2017