German parody series looks like a hoot but my attempts to watch an episode ended in disappointment
Merkel, who retired in 2021, is apparently so keen on ITV’s cosy crime drama – which is surprisingly popular throughout Europe – that when she made a two-day official visit to the UK in 2010, then prime minister David Cameron presented her with a box set of the series.
Sadly, we don’t yet know how Merkel feels about now being the “star” of her very own cosy crime show, the German-made Miss Merkel. If she’s watched it, she’s kept her thoughts to herself so far.
Based on an ongoing series of novels by bestselling German author David Safier, Miss Merkel imagines the retired politician as an amateur detective solving murders in the manner of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, to whom the title owes an obvious debt, or Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote.
The first of two 90-minute Miss Merkel mysteries, entitled ‘Murder in the Castle’ (a third is in the pipeline), made its debut on German station RTL last year and, dubbed into Italian, aired on Italy’s Rai2 last week.
Let’s hope an Irish or British broadcaster picks it up soon, because it looks like unmissably demented TV.
After 15 years serving as German chancellor, the real Merkel said she planned to spend her retirement catching up on her sleep and her reading. Not so the fictional version, played by veteran German actress Katharina Thalbach, who sports Merkel’s trademark bob and collarless jackets.
Merkel and her husband Joachim Sauer (Thorsten Merten) try to settle into the quiet life in her home region of Uckermark, north-east of Berlin (the real Merkel has a holiday home there). But Merkel is bored and restless.
When a local aristocrat, who likes to play dress-up, is murdered, she sets out to solve the crime with the reluctant help of her bodyguard Mike (Tim Kalkhof). Merkel is also accompanied by her faithful but flatulent dog, a pug called Helmut (wisely changed from Putin in the books). The gag here is that the real Merkel is terrified of dogs, having once been bitten by one.
Unfortunately, my frankly heroic efforts to see a full episode of Miss Merkel online ended in disappointment, so all we can go on are two trailers and the reaction in Germany. Miss Merkel looks like an absolute hoot and plays the premise for broad laughs.
In the first trailer, Merkel snoops around dark corners with a flashlight, peers through binoculars and scours crime scenes for clues using a magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate.
She narrowly dodges death when an arrow whizzes past her in a forest. She and Mike have an even narrower escape when a corpse falling from a roof almost flattens them. It’s promptly followed by a blob of bird poo plopping onto the victim’s face.
In the second, she finds a body, face down, legs aloft, in a ditch while out walking Helmut, and then we see her, Mike and Joachim trying to crash some sinister cult gathering of people in hooded robes. Thalbach hams it up wildly throughout, gasping and yelping, howling and braying, eyes almost popping out of her head.
“I was successful as a politician,” she says, “why can’t I do the same as a detective?”
Miss Merkel has certainly been successful in the ratings, picking up three million viewers on RTL, plus more on catch-up, while the reaction on social media has been mostly positive, albeit in a so-bad-it’s-good vein.
The response of German reviewers, on the other hand, has been po-faced and hostile. One newspaper accused it of “plundering the German culture of humour” and called it “embarrassing”.
Writers have been having fun jamming real people into fictional scenarios for years. Seth Grahame-Smith followed up his parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Both were turned into films.
The animated series Agent Elvis featured Presley – who seriously asked president Richard Nixon to make him a federal agent – moonlighting as a Secret Service man, while Channel 4 sitcom The Windsors depicted the royal family as dysfunctional idiots and was far more fun than the ponderous The Crown (and possibly more accurate, too).
Miss Merkel might well have paved the way for a whole new genre of shows featuring recently unemployed politicians. Rishi Sunak, PI! Leo Varadkar: Police Surgeon! Suella the Migrant Slayer! Actually, that last one sounds more like a pitch for a documentary.
Anybody know what Simon Coveney plans to do when he retires? I might have a few ideas.