2024-07-17 04:21:30
Embarrassing TV blunders? For Barbara Schöneberger, there are worse things. The presenter is known for being open about her mistakes. This was no exception.
Barbara Schöneberger is known for her entertaining manner. But as the TV presenter now reveals in the podcast “Mit den Waffeln einer Frau”, she also had to overcome difficult moments at the beginning of her career. The 50-year-old remembers an embarrassing appearance in 1998. At the time, she was presenting the show “Tie Break” on the broadcaster DSF, now Sport1.
The station hired Schöneberger after an appearance on the “Harald Schmidt Show”. Presenter Harald Schmidt was enthusiastic about his young colleague and trumpeted that Schöneberger should get her own show – Sport1 jumped at the chance. The station also hired its new presenter for revealing clips, which it re-circulated for the 30th anniversary, among other things.
But her regular job, tennis presenting, became Schöneberger’s biggest hurdle. “I had no idea about tennis at the time. But nobody knew that,” Schöneberger said about her first assignments as a sports presenter. This lack of knowledge meant that she was unable to handle an interview situation with tennis player Yevgeny Kafelnikov appropriately and failed: “I didn’t know any of them. I was supposed to interview Yevgeny Kafelnikov about the match he had just played. But I didn’t know what to ask him.”
After her first broadcast, the audience reaction was said to be negative. According to Schöneberger, there were numerous complaints to the station. Her boss immediately took her off the show. “He said: ‘You can’t do it,'” Schöneberger continued in her podcast. This moment was a shock for the then 25-year-old presenter: “Someone counted down in my ear: 3 – 2 – 1. And I was on it and didn’t know what to say.”
Despite this embarrassing incident, Schöneberger managed to establish herself in the television industry. Today, she is one of the most famous TV faces in Germany. The podcast “Mit den Waffeln einer Frau” provides insights into the beginnings and challenges of her career and shows that even successful people have to learn to deal with failure.