The presentation of a microwave made his voice a jubilee, a Malle weekend sounded in his words like the adventure in a South Seas paradise. For eight years Walter Freiwald was the illusionary timbre of the RTL show "The price is hot". In over 1800 episodes, he presented the potential winnings he embalmed studio and television viewers of the private broadcaster with an organ for which every used car dealer would have sold his mother.
Freiwald was the miraculous counterexample of the fact that for a career in the visual medium of television you need above all a pleasing, smooth face - he had success above all through his voice. From 1989 to 1997 he sang, jubilated and cajoled on the side of host Harry Wijnvoord by "The price is hot".
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"The price is hot": Harry Wijnvoord, Walter Freiwald and assistants
His role has been steadily expanded over the years: Announcer, Heater, Break Clown, the man with the distinctive center parting was on the show to its own brand, not only auditory, but also visually. My God, Walter! What did you have for a run!
His life had not started easily: born in 1954 in the East Frisian town of Wittmund, Freiwald revealed in his memoirs ("Frei Schnauze and with a wink") that he had a hard childhood with much beatings and little love in the Ruhr behind him. As a long-haired youthful runaway, he had fled his parents' home - and had become a victim of a sexual criminal.
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Music fan Freiwald
He did a commercial apprenticeship and started working for the record label EMI. Thomas Gottschalk remembered that Freiwald had brought him the latest records to Bayerischer Rundfunk, where he moderated. The two met again in Luxembourg, where Walter Freiwald had meanwhile brought him to music at the radio station RTL.
In the foreground were the channels led by Frank Elstner in the eighties many talents, who soon became the regular staff of the so successful private TV channel RTL plus. Including Hugo Egon Balder, lived with the Freiwald in a two-person flat. Freiwald must have itched to be able to step into the limelight himself.
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Moderator Walter Freiwald in the studio at Radio Gong 2000 in Munich
His moment came when Helmut Markwort brought him to Munich, the then editor-in-chief of the TV magazine "Gong". In 1985, Freiwald welcomed the listeners of the first Bavarian private radio station Radio Gong 2000. There Freiwald was allowed to let off steam, caused human emergencies and traffic chaos, moderated in front of 20,000 people in the Olympic Park. "This was a great time when I also met my wife Annette," Freiwald later wrote in a women's magazine.
The voice was so practiced, the Rampensau instincts sharpened, Walter Freiwald was ready for his unforgotten TV phrases "And here it is again, the show of fantastic prizes. Be there when it says again: the price is hot! "
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Harry Wijnvoord (left) and Walter Freiwald
1997 "The price is hot" on RTL deposed, the audience had become too old for the desired advertising target group. But Walter Freiwald simply remained, as he himself put it, "thoroughbred seller". For the German offshoot of the US teleshopping channel QVC, he became the face of the station, with great dedication, as the Spiegel in March 2000 observed: "The quick speaker, who burps in the studio while working, describes back bandages and bed pads of the brand 'Magnoflex 'as true marvels of the health service.'
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TV salesman Freiwald (with Stefanie Hertel and her jewelery collection)
Such qualities led Freiwald back to the broadcaster universe in which his career had begun: When the channel RTL Shop started in 2001, he was of course involved as "Mr. Teleshopping". Because she realized in 2008 that she was "not a trading company", the RTL group sold the shopping channel - this was accompanied by Freiwald's departure. When his wife Annette fought a brain tumor, he did not work for a while to take care of her - and then found nothing new for two years.
Walter Freiwald was, so to speak, the first generation of German trash TV. He was one of the entertainment freaks of the lower engine rooms of the private television industry, who tirelessly shoveled coal to keep the trash steamers moving, and at the end of their careers, they burned themselves. Freiwald was made for the jungle camp, which was inevitably waiting for him at the end - but in which he, agitated by all the impositions that had happened to him until then, ran to great form.
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Jungle camper Freiwald 2015
The 2015 Camp season with pop singer-songwriter Patricia Blanco and ex-Caught-in-the-Act singer Benjamin Boyce was an almost dull event, as many participants caused a sensation in a very exhausting manner or were simply too boring. Freiwald brought in the star appeal that really counts in the jungle - a poorly controllable character with rough edges. And put a few highlights.
What Freiwald was doing - sometimes passively denying, sometimes ironically oscillating and mostly doing jungle examinations at the lower performance level - was not consistently sympathetic. You can not say that it had style. But at least he knew what was expected - and blasted something.
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Walter Freiwald 2015 in his house in Meerbusch
"Rumor has it that Walter would be the first to buy in," said Sonja Zietlow at some point in the show. In fact, he was the only one who would have been allowed to capitalize on this season. He could have kept grumbling in the jungle there. Most of all about the good old days of private television, when he wore jackets with shoulder pads and patterned ties, and there were not any abandoned and penniless celebs because "GZSZ" had not got enough and "Big Brother" only ran in the Netherlands.
That would have been but probably not a revenue-generating Quotenrenner more, but rather a show that you look, if you come home at night after four Gin Tonic and still needs a bit of sprinkling. Walter would just have nagged you to sleep. Now he will do that in another place. Walter Freiwald died on Saturday at the age of 65 years as a result of a cancer that he had made public two weeks earlier.