Once an indispensable weekend ritual, today still an institution on German television and soon officially ennobled with a stamp as a “German television legend”: We’re talking about the sports show.
The new special stamp with a postage value of 85 cents will be available from October 10th in post offices with a full range, in the online shop or by telephone from the Deutsche Post order service (Tel.: 0961 – 3818 – 3818). The motif shows the show’s historic logo in front of a football game. It was designed by Thomas Steinacker and Bettina Walter, both stamp designers at Deutsche Post. The stamp is the eighth motif in the “German TV Legends” stamp series, which has been running since 2016 and also includes “Tatort” and “Dinner for one”. The official issuer of the stamp is the Federal Ministry of Finance.
Before the sports show, “Polizeiruf” and “Tatort” also received their own stamp
The “Sportschau” had its premiere on June 4, 1961. It initially ran on ARD’s second program – ZDF didn’t exist at the time – on Sundays at 9:30 p.m. At that time, there was still no football, but the topics of the first program, moderated by Ernst Huberty, were women’s handball, equestrian sports, cycling races and rowing. With the introduction of the Bundesliga, the sports show moved to its regular location on early Saturday evenings in 1963. From the mid-1960s, the sports show became a cult and an “absolute shrine” (according to the former presenter Gerhard Delling). At peak times, between ten and fifteen million viewers watched the program.
How big the fan base of the sports show was became clear at the latest when the now legendary “Goal of the Month” vote was introduced. When the audience was first asked to vote on it in March 1971, the station received two hundred and fifty thousand responses. 120,000 postcards flooded the editorial office, and inmates at the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne then helped to sort the mountain of mail.
Many viewers also associate the sports show of earlier times with the detailed presentations of galloping and trotting sports, for which the horse enthusiast Adolf “Addi” Furler was responsible, who, along with Ernst Huberty, Günter Siefarth and Karl Senne, was one of the founding presenters of the sports show. He shaped the show for three decades and presented the much-noticed election for “Galoper of the Year”.
In 1982, Heribert Faßbender (“Good Evening Everyone”) took over ARD’s flagship sports program. Only a few years later there was a turning point when the radio station lost the first exploitation rights for the Bundesliga and turned to other sports. This dry spell ended with the 2003/04 season. Since then, football has once again been prominently featured in a sports show that was completely renovated at the time and was considered the most technically modern sports program in Europe. The “mother of all sports programs on German television” is as popular as ever with audiences: an average of almost five million viewers tune in on Saturdays.
Source: www.digitalfernsehen.de
