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Alfred Biolek grilling sausages (end of the eighties): The role of the great uncle
Photo: United Archives / ZIK Images / picture alliance
Alfred Biolek was happy to tell the story of the Swabian grandmother who prepares the best potato salad in the world, but who does not want to reveal its secret to anyone.
Only when she lies on her death bed and is asked for the recipe by her favorite granddaughter does she reveal the crucial trick: "I've always done a little too little".
He will have liked the story so much because the punch line applied to him too. As a moderator, he
shaped
an entire era,
his
era, primarily with the fact that he never
wanted
too
much, never did
too
much - and yet always different from everyone else. One of his principles was that the host should never give the impression on television that he was smarter than his guests.
Alfred Franz Maria Biolek was born in 1934 in the east of the Czech Republic, his father was a lawyer, his mother was interested in art.
The son gained his first experience as an altar boy in front of an audience.
The Sudeten German family fled from the Red Army to Waiblingen, where Alfred Biolek graduated from high school.
As a law student in Freiburg, Munich and Vienna - he wanted to take over his father's office - he founded a cabaret, joined an association and was a member of the CDU.
At that time, Biolek looked like a younger brother of Peter Sellers
He completed his studies as a doctor of law with a thesis on "The liability of the seller and manufacturer of defective goods to pay damages under English law". The gloomy prospect of having to deal with the like further drove him to a new television station in 1963: ZDF. There he only worked in the legal department until his affable and entertaining manner caught the attention of those responsible - and he switched to the editorial department. At that time, Biolek looked like a younger brother of Peter Sellers and soon presented programs such as “Tips for Drivers” or the legendary early evening tabloid format “The Turntable”.
Today you can hardly imagine the pressure under which he had to live as a gay man.
When the "gay paragraph" was repealed, he moved to Munich, which was comparatively liberal at the time, to Bavaria.
"I lived wildly," he commented later that time.
The Police made their first appearance in Germany at Biolek
Also far removed from the smell of the Federal Republic were his ideas of television, as he had experienced it as an exchange student in the USA.
As a doer behind the scenes, he produced for WDR and with Rudi Carell “On the run”, so to speak the “Wetten, dass ...?” Of the 1970s.
And it was he who brought the British comedian group Monty Python to Germany at a time when their humor was not even understood here.
He himself was never drawn to the big stage; as a friend of cabaret, he preferred the more discreet format - the talk show.
One of his innovations was that he expanded the conversation format to include music.
And something like "Bio's Bahnhof", which went on the air every Thursday from 1978 to 1982, had existed up to then - and not since then.
With his invitation policy, he effortlessly brushed aside the line between entertainment and high culture.
A Vicky Leandros as well as a Karlheinz Stockhausen could drive into “Bio's Bahnhof”.
There was DAF and Adriano Celentano, BAP and Charles Aznavour, Nina Hagen and Sammy Davis Junior, who found the words so praiseworthy that Biolek learned them by heart: “This is the most unique and wonderfully mixed television show I've ever had the pleasure of being in «.
The uncle clung to him until he could make his peace with it.
The Police made their first appearance in Germany with Biolek, and it had caught Kate Bush on a visit to London before she started her world career on Top Of The Pops - and then introduced in the most obscene way imaginable, with a rhyme : "Music is not perceived as disturbing as long as it is felt with Kate Bush".
The uncle clung to him until he could make his peace with it.
The father, he said later, was strict, fair, but distant.
Grandfather “nice, but a little boring.
The only one who was really great is the uncle «.
And so he played the role of the great uncle - also in "alfredissmo!", The mother of all of a whole genre, the cooking programs.
With this, Biolek had translated a private ideal into television in 1994, which was also an innovation, and cooked with guests, chatting with them as casually as possible at the stove, and pouring wine.
Planned by himself as a weekly "high mass of cultivated entertainment" and directed from 1991 to 2003, "Boulevard Bio" was actually exactly that - and not a confrontational or even investigative format.
It relied entirely on the magic of informal chat, which Biolek so suited.
Anyone who came to "Bio" had nothing to fear.
So everyone came.
A Monica Lewinsky dared to come here, a Britney Spears got lost here in 2002, who, as SPIEGEL judged at the time, met Biolek "with the fascination and patronage of an elderly man," "who thinks he is with a small child or a Martian who has just landed talk". 2002 was actually the year when Biolek hit the limits of the chatter.
This was followed by Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin, whose talent for instrumentalization he had as little to oppose as he did in 1996 with the legendary performance of Helmut Kohl. At that time the country learned nothing about powdery mildew and power, but much about small foods like caramel pudding, which the Chancellor used to prepare with 18 eggs. As an entertainer at an old university, for Biolek the private was not political, but private. No comment on his forced outing by the activist Rosa von Praunheim in 1991. Only years later did he admit that this blow had released him a little from his "tension".
He once said that he was never able to fill out Marcel Proust's famous questionnaire because he had no favorite food, book or music: "I am a generalist".
He always saw himself as a figure between the chairs, a Tonio Kröger, as he revealed in a conversation with Frank Elstner: "The artists consider me a citizen and the citizens consider me an artist."
In truth, he was probably what he once called an "applied artist."
Genre: conversation.
"I always knew," he said, "when it was over."
And he knew how to disappear - a gift only given to the greatest artists.
Rock'n'Roll wasn't his thing.
So far from him was the ideal of dying on stage.
At the age of 72, he retired from the business.
He continued to hold talks, ran a neat salon in Berlin, catered for big names and interesting people - but privately.
A fall in 2010 also ended this section.
Biolek withdrew to Cologne again, wrote an autobiography (»Mein Leben«), which he would have preferred to call »stairs«, based on the poem by Hermann Hesse, which he understood as the leitmotif of his life: »Life's call to us will never be end, well then, heart, say goodbye and healthy! "
Alfred Biolek died on Friday morning after a long illness in his apartment in Cologne.
He was 87 years old.
