Dear Friends of German Comedy,
What a good month we all had.
All but the England football team that is. But let’s hope Russia drops points away to Israel and England qualify for the European Championships as a major football tournament just isn’t the same without England. Losing on penalties.
This pedestrian joke is as it stands one of the highlights of my new solo show about British sport and leisure, which I find a lot harder to write than I expected.
I want the show to be critically acclaimed. At the same time it has to be straight forward and work at any sport club in the country. It has to be interesting for punters that are familiar with traditional British sports such as bull-baiting and know the impact of the Industrial revolution on leisure. But it also has to be enjoyable for people who don’t know a ‘leg before’ from their elbow. Last but not least I don’t want it to turn into one big exercise of Brit-bashing.
By now I have to admit that these expectations are unrealistically high and bound to end in a crushing disappointment, which ironically would be an altogether fitting summary of British professional sport.
Last month I went for the first time ever to Coventry and felt a considerable amount of guilt for the German air raids that destroyed what must have been a beautiful city full of Tudor buildings.
This guilt was gone though when I saw that the only remaining Tudor building doesn’t host a history museum or the mayor’s office but is used as a Wetherspoon pub, the gastro-equivalent of a derelict council estate. Only more depressing.
So it’s fair to assume that the locals would have turned the city into something atrocious by now anyway – air raids or not.
Have a great month
Henning
