Bet on England

One of the peculiar pleasures of going abroad has always been watching other people’s TV channels, as far as I’m concerned. Stuck in my Frankfurt hotel knocking out press releases for the national media, I’ve been doing rather a lot of it recently. Most of it has been football related of course, including all three games on Sunday. As a result I now know that ‘Tor’ is the German word for ‘Goal’ and that former West German striker Rudi Voller thought Angola was in the British Empire. I say used to, because he was put right by the presenter of Germany’s Who Wants To be A Millionaire. He was then reminded of his poor general knowledge in a flash-back to his appearance on the show before last night’s game between the Africans and their one-time colonial masters Portugal (don’t tell me you didn’t know either?) You see the Fatherland’s answer to Chris Tarrant also presents the footie over here, complete with giant yellow microphones, and he takes great pleasure in taking the you know what out of Voller.

But not as much as Jurgen Von Der Lippe enjoyed taking it out of a large woman called Natalie who later appeared on his show “Wat is?” over on Channel Three. Natalie’s only crime, other than those against fashion, is that she’s a lover of albino rats. She’d even brought one onto his show complete with his cage, grooming products and food (white bread, lettuce and an uncooked corn on the cob it would seem). I found it difficult to follow most of the conversation, not knowing a word of German (other than ‘receipt’ and now ‘goal’) but it was intriguing viewing nevertheless. The rat, who I believe to be called Moses, spent most of the show desperately trying to escape the clutches of both the heavily bearded Jurgen and his owner. I can only assume that the pair were wearing their brightly coloured shirts for a bet. Either way, Moses wasn’t in on the joke and couldn’t wait to get free.

His opportunity came when he was paraded around various members of the audience, some more into their rats than others. He took a shine to one woman in particular in the front row who provided welcome relief in the form of a plain white blouse and a mullet. (Rats are ok with haircuts presumably). Pleased to have been separated from Jurgen, he began to urinate liberally all over the woman like he was an elephant on a black and white Blue Peter episode. Understandably, she wasn’t best pleased but the rest of the audience, including Moses’ mum thought it was hilarious. Had he not been ripping it out of Rudi I’m guessing Germany’s Chris Tarrant would have loved it too…