Germany’s best loved film to get its premiere at Scottish festival
A short film featuring a British music hall star that is known and loved by millions of Germans will finally receive its UK premiere in Scotland, more than half a century after it was filmed.
The 1963 comedy Dinner for One, which stars Freddie Frinton, has never been shown on British television or in cinemas despite being screened in Germany every New Year’s Eve for decades.
The 18-minute comic short has been a regular festive fixture on German TV since 1972, with millions of people arranging their evenings around it and able to quote it line by line.
Such is its popularity that according to one estimate more than a fifth of the German population, or 17 million people, tuned in to watch the sketch on New Year’s Eve in 2016.
The film will be shown for the first time in the UK this weekend as part of the Scottish Comedy Film Festival, after Mr Frinton’s family gave their permission for a public screening.
The Grimsby-born comedian used to perform the sketch as part of his music hall act in Blackpool. He filmed it in a single take for a German television company five years before his death in 1968.
In the film, Mr Frinton plays a long-serving and long-suffering butler called James who is helping his employer Miss Sophie celebrate her 90th birthday. As her four male admirers have long since died, he spares her blushes by taking on their roles at a dinner party, knocking back sherry, white wine, champagne and port to get himself through.
It has made Frinton so well known in Germany that a stamp was recently issued in his honour and next year a museum dedicated to his work will open in the port of Bremerhaven.
Mr Frinton’s son Mike said it was “lovely” that the film was finally being shown in the UK, adding that his father would have been “so chuffed” to appear on a bill that also features Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers.
“Dad just disappeared from the radar in Britain like many comedians from that era,” he said. “Unless you’re Morecambe and Wise and the BBC keeps repeating things over and over, then you get forgotten.”
The film will be shown twice over the weekend at Campbeltown Picture House in Argyll, which hosts the festival’s celebration of slapstick comedy.
The festival’s director Ailsa Mackenzie said she had “no idea” why the film was not better known in Britain, describing it as “proper laugh out loud funny”.
“Freddie is so good in it,” she added. “The timing is spot on. He performed it hundreds and hundreds of times and he loved it, it was his baby.”
Every New Years Eve, millions of German families gather round their television screens to watch it. They consider it a comedy classic and – what’s more – it’s British.
But despite its huge popularity among our continental cousins, it’s unlikely you’ve ever seen Dinner For One with music hall star Freddie Frinton. In fact, the 18-minute film – released in 1963 – has never been shown in cinemas or on television in the UK. But that changes this weekend when the short receives its long-overdue UK premiere at the Scottish Comedy Film Festival in Campbeltown. Now, it’s a standing joke in the UK that the Germans have no sense of humour but – according to festival director Ailsa Mackenzie – they very much do. The film is, she promises, “proper laugh out loud funny”. There’s something sweet about the way Germans have taken this very British production to their hearts. It’s also rather nice that, in these days of the self-destructive Brexit we describe above, our European neighbours can laugh at something British that is actually meant to be funny rather than at the predicament in which the nation has placed itself.