2023-11-06 17:21:31
Let’s be honest: we didn’t wear jeans for most of the time we spent with Hans Meiser (†77)…
That 90s feeling on a weekday afternoon: coming home. Whether from school or from shift. Bag or backpack in the corner. Remove the rigid trousers and put on the comfortable jogging trousers. On the couch. Lunch or coffee on your lap. Stare! And then he came by: the nice chatterbox uncle Hans Meiser on a house visit. And not only that: the talk show queens Bärbel, Sonja and Britt also entertained us for a few hours. Five days a week, between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
On the air with his own talk show since 1992: Hans Meiser hosted 1,700 editions for RTL
Photo: RTL
Dear younger readers: YES! That was the 90s on German TV afternoons. 4 p.m. at the latest (later 3 p.m.). An appointment with Meiser.
Channel 4 on the remote belonged (on most) to the father of talk shows. RTL was on there. In some living rooms it was still slightly snowy with a noisy picture because the cable TV connection had not yet been installed, the satellite antenna was too expensive and the room antenna just didn’t provide a better picture. None of that mattered. Because the German talk show pioneer was also about content.
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Meiser was the first German TV maker to bring the trend from the USA to the newly unified Federal Republic. The Americans had been having fun with the TV zoo for almost decades, which made do with the simplest basic ideas.
They were the top duo of talkers on RTL in the mid-90s: Ilona Christen (†58) and Hans Meiser presented their programs one after the other in the afternoon – first came Christen, then Hans
Foto: German Select/Getty Images
Meiser, as an established news professional with XL experience in radio and TV, recognized this. Simply reading out or moderating news was too boring for the young private broadcaster. With talk shows and mostly non-celebrity guests, a format came onto TV in which anything could happen. Cheap to produce. After all, everyone had problems. Guests who wanted to tell everything about their everyday lives, from neighborhood disputes to secret sex dreams, queued up in front of the channels and didn’t have to be cast at all. “The potential was completely different and we were able to make full use of it,” journalist Meiser once said about this time.
Oh, that was wonderful: watching people bring problems to the table that we never wanted to have. And secretly had! At its peak there were 13 or 14 talks and the audience was full.
Hans Meiser wasn’t just good at talk shows – during his time on TV he also interviewed political figures, such as then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the mid-90s
Photo: RTL
His advantage: his hair, which was already white at the time, and his background as a serious anchorman. In the early 1990s, an average of three million viewers tuned in to watch the nice uncle for an hour in the afternoon.
Television myth talk show: Hans Meiser made the new discovery for Germany a successful product after its launch on September 14, 1992 (until March 2001). In his slipstream: Ilona Christen (died in 2009), Bärbel Schäfer (59) and Sonja Zietlow (55). The afternoon talk ballooned. More channels, talk shows start after lunch and continue until the early evening. Suddenly there was chatter everywhere. Probably too much at some point.
Arabella Kiesbauer also got loud with her talk show – and her guests often did too
Foto: picture alliance / dpa
The protagonists’ stories had to become increasingly stark. Cheating, paternity testing in front of the camera, physical beating on the show. And more and more fake. The talk guests who signed up for an hour in the spotlight could choose whether they appeared on “Meiser”, “Britt” (Sat.1) or “Arabella” (ProSieben). Everything for the fee. More and more people came and told what was on their minds in more and more formats. At first the guests were mostly real, but later it became more and more scripted.
Bärbel Schäfer (center) also led a successful afternoon talk. Here she welcomed the former residents of the first “Big Brother” season in 2000
Foto: picture-alliance / dpa
Some guests wandered through the individual shows like TV nomads. At some point it tipped over. The television afternoon of the 90s had lost its innocence. Hans Meiser himself made fun of this development in one of his approximately 1,700 broadcasts and surprised everyone with a memorable edition before the end of his successful broadcast in 2001. In the actors staged a super fight. Meiser had recognized the development that watered down Talk and his once somewhat serious idea behind it.
Meiser at the time: “There are different types of pressure. Firstly, there is the time pressure. Everything always has to be ready the day after tomorrow and if there is no sun, the sun will be made. The headlights are brought out and the sun is shown. The other pressure is quota pressure.”
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After decades at RTL, after numerous successful formats apart from the afternoon talk (including “Notruf”), the news man at the Cologne station came to an end in 2010. Not entirely voluntary. He refrained from the big fight in the style of a reckoning show, even if they “shot me down like a wild sow in the morning sun.”
The talk show pioneer withdrew and in recent years has also caused a stir with conspiracy theories. Meiser found happiness with his third wife in Scharbeutz on the Baltic Sea. He still had big plans for a newly founded radio station.
The TV afternoons of the past no longer exist today. The chatter of the 90s – told. Hans Meiser has now died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 77.
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