BECOMING A LIED SINGER: THOMAS QUASTOFF AND THE ART OF GERMAN SONG, BBC4, 8pm
WHEN we was last in Berlin I was suffering tremendous claustrophobia so we couldn’t use any rush hour trains or trams. We walked everywhere.
Getting back to our hotel at night we were fit for nothing but flopping on the bed with some cold Cokes and watching German TV – and that’s where we found the sheer magic that was Hit Parade, a West German version of Top of the Pops. Repeats from the 1970s and 80s are glorious to watch: cheesy, jovial, bumptious. Find them on YouTube; you won’t regret it.
That style of music was called schlager, and this fun documentary will introduce you to another type of German song: lieder. Not as silly as schlager, lieder are wildly romantic songs with strong melodies, and the greats such as Brahms and Schubert have composed a few.
Thomas Quastoff is a famous singer of lieder and he takes us on a musical tour.
FORGOTTEN GIRLS and HELLFJORD, WALTER PRESENTS, ALL 4
WALTER Presents is part of All 4, Channel 4’s on-demand service. The channel, whose programmes are personally chosen by a chap called Walter Iozzulino, specialises in foreign-language dramas and while they’ve yet to better debut show, Deutschland ‘83, there are still plenty worth watching.
Two new ones launch today. Forgotten Girls is a French drama about the disappearance of a young woman which sets a gruff detective, Christian Janvier, on to a theory that her abduction is linked to the disappearances of six other women. But has the killer been careless this time?
We also have the premiere of Hellfjord, a comedy drama set in Norway. A cop has been sacked from his job in Oslo and is banished from the capital to serve his notice in a dismal fishing village in the frozen north.
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