557 words on Live
Uh, there’s Sarah Kuttner and she has a show on telly. Of course you’d need to watch it regularly to fully appreciate it, but a short summary would be that after doing some other music telly stuff she started having her own show on the German music channel Viva a while ago. It’s a bit like late night shows with a sidekick (named Sven, so he has to be great!), a band coming to play and someone coming for an interview.
Last year Viva was bought by MTV so we could have less original programming and more ‘pimp my whatever’ and SMS games on telly. After that Sarah’s show moved over to MTV and from Köln to Berlin. I’d say the quality of the bands and guests coming to the show also went down with that. As did the age of the studio audience which changed from ‘too young’ to ‘way too young’.
But Sarah remained a constant. Whoever you talk to seems to have a strong opinion on her. Either people love her because she’s just great, entertaining, hot, role-model and so on. Or people hate her because she’s talking a lot – and quickly. Obviously I’m with the former group. And I try to see her show whenever possible. I particularly love her skill to make about anybody look a bit stupid. And that isn’t done in a mean way but just by directly asking pretty obvious questions in a rapid succession. Something that people aren’t used to. It’s as great as it is simple.
And she published a book Das oblatendünne Eis des halben Zweidrittelwissens.
(The wafer-thin ice of the half two-third knowledge) [buy at amazon.de] now. That said – by my expectations and her own comments – she’s not a big writer, so the book is just a collection of the columns she wrote for a music magazine and a newspaper in the past year. And she went on a reading tour with those, coming to Göttingen as the last stop of the tour.
Apparently the original venue (where we went to see Herbert Feuerstein who also like Sarah’s show) was sold out really quickly, so the event was moved to a large university lecture hall. And while the audience looked a bit more mature than what this week’s press suggested, there were still numerous people around who may have been little older than half my age.
The first bit of fun was that the guy who helped organise and run the show in Göttingen is really tall and that Sarah is rather small. They started off by standing next to each other which looked a bit strange. And then came some chatting, some answering of audience questions and some reading from the book. As many of her columns are in question-answer style, she got people from the audience to read the questions.
So we had a bunch of fifteen year olds reading out the questions which was odd – and getting cuddly virus shaped thingies as a thank you for that. Sarah also asked them what they were doing. And when one of them answered something business-studies-like, her spontaneous reaction was to say ‘gosh, I wonder how this works: you leave school and just think uh, it’d be really fun to do business stuff’. Straightforward, disarming, cool.
Hmmmmm, great….