A Salve For Homesickness

The celebrities are different here, but I still recognize them.

The Big Lebowski on French TV.

Discussed: TV stars, foreign cultures, language problems, watching TV in hotels

There’s no better classroom for a language student than a train platform. Every few minutes, a loudspeaker crackles with an announcement that’s full of numbers, words of apology, and other helpful vocabulary words. You have to pay attention, because after each announcement, a stranger who didn’t hear it will ask you what was said. Then, you make small talk until the next announcement. If Swiss trains weren’t so punctual, I’d probably be multilingual by now. 

When I’m not focused on announcements, I turn my attention to advertisements. Waiting in Mainz, Germany, a few months ago, I studied a billboard of a smiling mustachioed middle-aged man in an apron looking at three cloche-covered plates. “Drei Teller für Lafer,” it said. I knew the words for “three” and “for.” “Teller” and “Lafer” were a mystery. One surely referred to the man, but in German, common nouns get capitalized, which makes it hard to distinguish names in print. Humbled, I asked my travel companion, who told me “Teller” meant “plate,” so the man must be Lafer. 

Lafer, I later learned online, is Johann Lafer, a famous TV chef. Drei Teller für Lafer is his latest show. Later, I pulled up some clips of Lafer’s work. He’s a lot like American TV chefs—here’s Lafer in a monogrammed apron on a set that looks like a home kitchen; here’s Lafer on location trying food and wine next to people who aren’t famous; here’s Lafer joking through a late night show segment on grilling; here’s Lafer teaching an online course about the perfect potato. 

I spent a couple hours with Lafer clips. I do this a lot with German and Swiss TV. I tell myself it’s educational; I’m immersing myself in the language. I’ve met so many people who learned English through television, I wonder if I can learn German this way. Except those people learned when they were children, in the years of life when language comes easier. I am not a child, I’m just obsessed with TV. “Learning” is my excuse to spend time with a TV whenever I encounter one (good thing I don’t have one at home), and it’s a flimsy excuse at that. I spent an hour parsing a dub of Storage Wars in a Berlin hotel room this winter and only picked up the word for a portable toilet. 

It can be dispiriting to be an American flipping channels in a new country. I can find an array of news, dramas, and sitcoms from Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Turkey, and the U.K, but when it comes to American shows, I only ever seem to come across dreck like Storage Wars or Hoarders, always dubbed, and almost always dubbed with a voice that’s far more calm and collected than the shouting on the show. It doesn’t help national pride to see your country depicted as a place where people comb through mountains of old junk in hopes of either making a few dollars or preventing a loved one from being crushed under twenty years of gardening magazines. Linear TV may not be the cultural force it once was, but it’s still a window to the wider world. When I come across an American show, I try to pull the shade on that window. 

There’s plenty of corn on TV here, too. Around the carnival season, German channels were full of variety shows with oompah music, puppet comedians, and men in loud suits. There are high-production, acclaimed dramas, too. But when I need comforting TV, I look somewhere in-between these two extremes. My favorite local show is Bares for Rares (“Cash for Rarities,” literally). In the show, an expert appraises a guest’s heirloom, then antique dealers who haven’t seen the appraisal bid to buy the item from the newly informed guest. It’s a bit of Storage Wars added to Antiques Roadshow, though not as desperate as the former and not as history-minded as the latter. The host of this show, Horst Lichter, had a show with Lafer for years called Lafter! Lichter! Lecker! (“Lecker” means “delicious” in this context.) He’s also a middle-aged mustachioed man. I guess that’s how to get on TV here. 

Even though these shows aren’t American, they’re a salve for my homesickness. I may not know what Lafer says, but I understand who he is—an avuncular TV chef. I can’t catch all the numbers on Bares for Rares, but I know the format and I know the inflection of an appraiser offering a good deal. I recognize the rhythms of game shows even when I can’t understand the questions. I understand the applause for a host everyone else knows. The dubbed dialogue in American shows is a constant reminder of their foreignness. With local shows, the familiarity of the premise, the editing, and the delivery bridges the language gap. 

I’m sure if I were a native speaker, or even a better student of German, I’d avoid these shows. Locals sometimes tease me when they hear what I watch. They roll their eyes at Bares for Rares just like I feel the need to apologize for Storage Wars. They tell me there are better things to watch. I know there are better shows. But none of them make me feel quite so at home.