Englische Ansage

It shows a continuity announcer who summarizes the plot of an English crime series, but fails because of the hard-to-pronounce names.

The sketch shows a woman announcing the eighth episode of the 16-part English TV crime series Die zwei Cousinen (The Two Cousins).

This plot is highly absurd,[2] contains numerous trivialities and is characterized by English names of people and places that are complicated to articulate for Germans.

Mentioned places are Middle Fritham, Nether Addlethorpe, and North Cothelstone Hall, the country estate of the Hesketh-Fortescues.

In the course of the announcement, however, she increasingly mixes English phonemes with German words; for example, she uses th sounds to replace either an "s" ("Schlipth" instead of "Schlips"), a "ts" ("nachth" instead of "nachts"), a "z" (aufthuthuchen" instead of "aufzusuchen"), or a "t" ("triffth" instead of "trifft").

[10] The sketch "Englische Ansage" is contained three times in the DVD collection Loriot – Die vollständige Fernseh-Edition.

[6] "Englische Ansage" is interpreted as a satire on the German TV adaptations of scripts by the English writer Francis Durbridge that became blockbusters in West Germany in the 1960s.

The multi-part crime movies were characterized by convoluted content, which was summarized by an announcer before the new episode was aired.

[12] Besides, the sketch can be understood as a parody of the pretended cosmopolitanism of some Germans who try to pronounce English words as accurately as possible.

[13] Loriot later addressed this topic again in his second movie Pappa Ante Portas, in which the protagonist Heinrich Lohse reads the English instead of the German version of a multilingual instruction manual to his wife.

While the television announcer from "Englische Ansage" despairs of pronouncing complicated English names, the meter maid in "Parkgebühren" fails to make herself understandable because of her officialese.