Anja Reschke, the presenter of the television magazine “Panorama” and head of the culture and documentation program at Norddeutscher Rundfunk, is known to television viewers as a very serious person – as a joker, joke teller and humorist, she has hardly anything to show for it. And exactly that, this serious, almost strict image, would be an almost perfect qualification if you wanted to cast her as the host of a rather irresponsible late-night show.
Buster Keaton, one of the funniest people in film history, never laughed either. The audience should laugh, if at all. And there are already enough permanent grins and so-called comedians who laugh the loudest at their own jokes on German television. Anja Reschke, on the other hand, if she exaggerated her seriousness, her severity, her seriousness just a little; if she didn’t show even the hint of a friendly smile; and if at the same time a few gifted gag writers worked on the punch lines with just as seriousness: broadcast late in the evening, that could be a nice, effective disturbance of the peace.
“Reschke television” is what Alexander Gauland once called the public political television he despised and despised as left-wing green. “Reschke Fernsehen” is now the name of the show that premieres this Thursday, late at night, which would be the right time to surpass Alexander Gauland’s nightmares.
Oh how beautiful Bavaria is
They want to combine politics and entertainment – and the fact that the show has neither one nor the other to offer is less due to Anja Reschke than to her people, especially to those who apparently do not exist in the team: gag writers, experts in timing, staging. And for irony. She should relax: Apparently that was the only directing instruction, and so Anja Reschke goes to the studio at the beginning and has far too much trouble playing the role of the show star, which she is not, for her to have any strength to ironize this role. She only plays for show, she then says, but what really matters to her is politics.
Which is not a gag, but the whole, a bit dull truth: The first show is about Bavaria, about the Prime Minister’s claim that you are number one, or at least number two, when it comes to expanding renewable energies. And that the Bavarians, because their landscape is so beautiful, do not build any wind turbines or power lines for energy from the north. All of which is very outrageous. It’s just that every newspaper reader and radio listener is 100% familiar with it.
The fact that it is not North German, anti-Bavarian resentment that drives Anja Reschke is perhaps not so well known. She is from Munich, and she also emphasizes that, and so that everyone really believes it, she stands there for a moment in a dirndl. And then she reminds you that this whole Bavaria with its beauty was not created by the CSU.
One is shocked by the boldness of this claim.
“Reschke Fernsehen” runs Thursday at 11:35 p.m. on ARD.