Under the Hill

I don’t know if I should laugh or cry: Over the last two years there has been a big hunt for a female police officer killing criminal with mob connections based mostly around southern Germany and Austria.

In 2006 an officer was shot in Heilbronn and the DNA traces which were brought in from the crime scene showed the presence of a female person at the car the officer was shot in. I still remember that case, a friend of mine was in Heilbronn that day and he told me that the police was frantic searching for the murderer and never found him/her.

The same DNA as in Heilbronn later was found in samples from crime scenes from all over southern Germany, and spreading over to Austria, from small burglaries into garden cottages to acts of violence and vandalism. They even started a whole special department trying to find this queen of crime who managed to elude the authorities somehow, and whose presence never actually could be verified by witnesses, only by DNA samples… and who is more trustful, a (maybe even criminal) witness, or an unbiased DNA sample? Read the rest of this entry »

“Dinner for One” is a rather obscure comedy sketch written by British author Laurie Wylie for theatre in the 1920s. In 1963 German regional public TV-station NDR made a recording of the piece for broadcast with Freddie Frinton and May Warden. In English actually, as everything English was kind of hip back then, even though people would not have called it that way. As the German audience was supposed not to know enough of English to actually understand the whole of it, it was produced with a little introduction in German explaining what exactly would happen on screen in the following 15 minutes. Not really the best way to keep the suspense up, but who did ever say Germans knew how humor works?

90-year old Miss Sophie (whose family name is omitted for the sake of decency) is having a birthday dinner with her four best friends/suitors. Unfortunately all of them are dead already, the last one of them died 25 years ago. So trusty butler James has to take their place toasting to the host. And while he does so he becomes increasingly sloshed. Hilarity ensues. Read the rest of this entry »