Famous Dutchmen (Germans) / Gone but not forgotten - Rudi Carell

Rudi Carell, one of Germany's most famous comedians is dead.

He was omnipresent on German T.V. so this is hard to believe. He came from the Netherlands (where he was born) to Germany, in the middle of the sixties.
He was adopted of his fans very fast and lived in Germany (near Bremen) since then.
He even favoured the German soccer team against the Dutch, when they played against each other. Otherwise he favoured the Dutch team.
He never gave up his Dutch nationality.

He was famous for:

• Smoking (no wonder he died of lung cancer)
• His Dutch accent he never lost (or wanted to lose)
• His meticulous working style, he never left anything to chance. It is said that his humour was seldom spontaneously.
• Being difficult and not always diplomatic
• His never changing haircut.

He was the king of the T.V. weekend in the late seventies and early eighties, when he had big success with the formats "Am laufenden Band" (1974 - 1979) and later "Rudis Tagesshow" (1981 - 1987). It was the high time of the great Saturday evening entertainment, when the whole family gathered round the T.V. screen and the T.V. program determined the following conversation topics.
Not every project of the creative artist was successfull.
Let's not talk about his movies, and only one song remains in memory: "Wann wird's mal wieder richtig Sommer?" (1975).
Some of his shows are forgotten rightly, like "Die Post geht ab" (1993) or "Rudis Suchmaschine".
But all in all he was a T.V. visionary, an imaginative and successfull developer of formats.
We will never forget the fabulous single show "Herzblatt" (1987-1993), which remained on T.V. until this year. Six moderators followed him, but never reached him. And after the Saturday evening genre had almost died out (besides "Wetten, dass.....?"), he created a new forum with the satiric week retrospect "7 Tage 7 Köpfe", which he attended as moderator until 2002 and later as producer.

I saw him last on T.V. in February, a moving last show of strength, when he was awarded the "Goldene Kamera" for his lifework. With a weak voice he commented self-deprecating his cancer sickness and thanked the pharma industry for giving him the chance to be there.