When I was a soldier serving in West Germany, a young lady friend of mine introduced me to an annual holiday special that I had never encountered before. I had seen Frosty and Rudolph, I had watched The Year Without a Santa and the Grinch stealing Christmas but I had never seen Dinner for One, and apparently most Americans haven't but they should, because other parts of the world enjoy it every year along with the other Christmas programs and New Years Specials but Dinner for One is a bit different, but very funny.
Lauri Wylie debuted "Dinner for One" as a sketch in his London stage revue En Ville Ce Soir in 1934.
The story is that Miss Sophie (May Warden) is celebrating her 90th birthday. As every year, she has invited her four closest friends to a birthday dinner: Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr. Pomeroy, and Mr. Winterbottom.
However, she has outlived all of them, requiring her butler James (Freddie Frinton) to impersonate the guests.
James not only must serve Miss Sophie the four courses à la russe – mulligatawny soup, North Sea haddock, chicken and fruit – but also serve the four imaginary guests the drinks chosen by Miss Sophie (sherry, white wine, champagne and port wine for the respective courses), slip into the role of each guest and drink a toast to Miss Sophie.
As a result, James becomes increasingly intoxicated and loses his dignified demeanour; he pours the drinks with reckless abandon, breaks into "Sugartime" by the McGuire Sisters for a brief moment, and at one point accidentally drinks from a flower vase, which he acknowledges with a grimace and exclaims "Huh, I'll kill that cat!"
There are several running gags in the piece:
- James frequently trips over the head of a tigerskin rug; as an additional punchline, he walks past it in one instance to his own astonishment, but then stumbles over it on the way back. In another instance, he gracefully steps over it, and in the final instance, the tipsy James leaps over the head.
- Sir Toby would like to have poured a small extra amount of each drink, and James complies with the request with initial politeness and then increasing sarcasm.
- Miss Sophie expects James, as Admiral von Schneider, to knock his heels together with the exclamation "Skål!" (Danish for "Cheers!"). Because this action proves painful, he asks each time whether he really has to, but obliges upon Miss Sophie's insistence. The gag is broken as an additional punchline when the drunk James' feet miss each other, causing him to stumble.
- Before each course, James asks and gradually babbles "The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?"; Miss Sophie replies "The same procedure as every year, James".
Finally, Miss Sophie concludes the evening with an inviting "I think I'll retire", to which James and Sophie repeat their exchange concerning the "same procedure".
James takes a deep breath, turns to the audience with a sly grin and says "Well, I'll do my very best" before the pair retreat to the upper rooms.
Freddy Frinton and May Warden performed Dinner for One on stage on Britain's seaside piers as early as 1945; Frinton had to pay a royalty each time the play was performed to writer Lauri Wylie but inherited the rights to the sketch in 1951 after Wylie's death.
The sketch was also staged elsewhere, for example in 1953 in John Murray Anderson's Almanac at the Imperial Theatre with Hermione Gingold playing Miss Sophie, Billy DeWolfe as the butler, and four dead friends.
In 1962, German entertainer Peter Frankenfeld and director Heinz Dunkhase discovered Dinner for One in Blackpool. The sketch was staged in Frankenfeld's live show soon afterwards, and recorded on 8 July 1963 at the Theater am Besenbinderhof, Hamburg, in front of a live audience. The sketch was recorded in English with a short introduction in German. The introductory theme, Charmaine, was composed by Lew Pollack and recorded by the Victor Silvester orchestra. According to the NDR, Frinton and Warden were each paid DM 4,150.
The show was re-run occasionally until it gained its fixed spot on New Year's Eve in 1972.
The comic premise of the skit—a man consuming multiple rounds of alcohol and becoming comically drunk—is generally credited to American actor Red Skelton, who included a similar sketch as part of his vaudeville routines beginning in 1928 (and allowed the premise to be used by Lucille Ball in the famed I Love Lucy episode "Lucy Does a TV Commercial").
There is no definitive evidence of when Wylie wrote the sketch; the first evidence there is of the "Dinner for One" sketch being performed is from 1934, and as neither Skelton nor Wylie were internationally famous at the time, neither one likely knew of the other's work.
It has become traditional viewing on New Year's Eve in European countries such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia, or on 23 December in Norway, and, as of 1995, was the most frequently repeated television programme in Germany ever.
Despite starting on the British stage, the sketch has only recently started to gain recognition in that country. The show is now broadcast every New Year's Eve in Britain on Sky Arts with its first national broadcast there airing in 2018.
In other parts of the world, the sketch is broadcast in Australia and South Africa.
Apart from a few satires, Dinner for One is not known in the United States, where the comic premise had already been made famous by Red Skelton and Lucille Ball but neither depiction matches the hilarity of Dinner for One.
The article "Dinner for One: The greatest cult film you've never heard of" investigates the reason for its obscurity.
In 2003, the Danish TV producer Paul Anthony Sørensen directed and produced a documentary about the sketch that includes interviews with relatives of Freddie Frinton and May Warden. It was nominated for the Rose d'Or 2004.
The line "Same procedure as every year" (in the original English) has become a very popular catchphrase in Germany. The phrase has entered everyday vocabulary, and is used in newspaper headlines and advertisements. This is also the case in Norway, Denmark and Sweden where the phrase has become a running joke about Christmas itself.
So do yourself a favor, check this out during the holiday season and see what you think. I searched for years to find a copy of this program and finally did a decade or so ago, love the digital age, and now we watch it each holiday season and join millions around the globe to laugh symbolically together over the silly sketch.
Here is a link to a UTube version of it, there are a few:
