At secondary school in Recklinghausen, Hape Kerkeling and some fellow students formed a band (Gesundfutter, meaning: health food) and published a record (Hawaii).

His breakthrough came in 1984/85 when, still aged only 19, he got a role in the Känguru [sic] television comedy show (the German word for kangaroo deliberately spelt without an "h" at the end although this broke the spelling rules at that time).

The best-known character in this show was the little boy Hannilein, played by Kerkeling, an irritating child with red hair in a pudding-basin style, dungarees and sitting on giant-sized chairs, who commented on the world of adults.

On the show, Kerkeling made television history on 25 April 1991 when he dressed up as Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands on a state visit to Berlin and almost managed to get into Schloss Bellevue to meet the President of Germany for lunch.

In 1992, Kerkeling turned down an offer by the big public broadcasting company ZDF to work on the popular prime-time show Wetten, dass..?

In April and May 2006, he presented the live TV show Let's Dance, the German version of Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars, with Nazan Eckes.

In June 2006, his book Ich bin dann mal weg (I'm off for a bit, then), his diary of this pilgrimage, was top of the Spiegel magazine non-fiction bestseller list.

Kerkeling's comment on the ensuing fuss (mostly in the gutter press) was that while anyone of a more sensitive nature than him would probably have climbed into the bath with a hairdryer, he could not see the point: they would be dragging another poor soul through the dirt the next day anyway.

[5] Horst Schlämmer is one of Kerkeling's current characters (and the most successful), the deputy editor of the fictitious newspaper Grevenbroicher Tagblatt.

Dressed in a grey trenchcoat and with a small black manbag on his arm, he holds interviews at real events such as the Bundestag elections.

as a celebrity candidate, and became the first person to persuade Günther Jauch, the presenter of Wer wird Millionär, into the contestant's seat.

According to a BBC piece, Horst Schlämmer would receive 18% of the German vote due partly to his Obama inspired slogan, "Yes weekend".

At the Cannstatter Volksfest festival in Stuttgart, for example, he went on the ghost train with Barbara Schöneberger, a TV host, and almost passed out with fear.

Kerkeling performs as a parody of an overweight, aging German Schlager music singer with streaky success and ridiculous lyrics in her songs.