The East German government needed attractive programming to keep people from tuning to the western channels all the time, so their best options were:
- variety shows, often featuring international stars
- lots of sports (coverage of big events was even more extensive than on western channels)
- international movies that didn't collide too much with communist ideology
- mild nudity

Pornography and prostitution officially didn't exist in the GDR but nudist beaches were officially allowed and reports about nudism even appeared on prime-time television.

https://youtu.be/jzZXZ3_Sxdg?t=6m49s
(The talking heads are from the present age but the footage from the beach is '80s GDR television.)

I had a coupl;e of brushes with communist TV in the mid-eighties. In 1986 I was covering an ice speedway race meeting in Wilmersdorf, Berlin and during a gap in the action decided to switch my monitor over to broadcast reception. I had glimpses of SFB and the DDR channels, plus EastEnders on BFBS. Surely if there was anything guaranteed to keep the easterners on their side of the wall, that was it!

Back in the hotel I caught an adult education programme on the DDR service teaching English. The opening titles included a montage of London sights, Tower Bridge and Karl Marx's tomb.

I also spent Christmas 1985 in Budapest where the festival was confined to Christmas Eve, the following day being a normal working one, in theory. MTV's prime offering for the citizens of Hungary was 'Waterloo Bridge', a wartime romance set in London, filmed in Hollywood with chirpy US cockneys speaking Hungarian.

We went to stay with friends in Keszthely out in the west near the Austrian border and have vivid memories of the lady of the house trying to get her pride and joy Trabant to fire up, then desperately trying to keep it on the rather rough roads. They spent most of their time watching JRT from Yugoslavia.

It's a shame that only a 1-minute clip of that programme survived on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VotPSW6zoRc
http://www.husfl.net/DDR-F/DDR-F-English01.jpg

But here's some more interesting stuff...


A Dutch TV documentary from 1987 about Friedrichstrasse, one of the most important boulevards in East Berlin, right next to the wall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ofCh5FGFKI
Both parts of the city celebrated Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987, so there was a lot of construction going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrichstra%C3%9Fe

A West German TV report from 1981 about towns and villages along the Berlin orbital motorway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnyR2m7iiZ8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesautobahn_10

A West German TV report from 1980 about Helmstedt, a small western town that was situated right next to the inner-German border:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcXBlp3i8rY
The Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing, on the Autobahn between Hannover and Berlin, was the largest of its kind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmst...order_crossing

A present-day documentary about the same border crossing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDlg9iGeg4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmst...order_crossing

I lived in Poznan from 1987 to 1989. Does anyone remember Polish television from the 80s? There were two channels. Colour TVs were available but most people had black and white sets.

Thanks for the Friedrichstrasse prog Karl. I crossed to the east at that station when on holiday in Berlin. It was all very grim at the checkpoint and you had to change a number of Deutschmarks into useless Eastern Marks which it was illegal to take out of the country. Many people, including us, gave their remaining marks to the waitresses at a cafe next to the station, who were all ugly and grumpy and I suspect Stasi.

Yeah, I remember the mandatory exchange. It was 25 DM per adult per day in the 80s, at the official rate of 1:1. Black market rates were 1:4 or 1:5.


I bet you could have found more attractive waitresses at other cafés down the road

I remember visiting Poland in the 90s and all the foreign programmes were dubbed but with just one guy doing it. So watching Baywatch for example, David Hasslehoff had the same voice as Pamela Anderson. Very strange

Yes, they call it lectoring. It's still common in many Eastern European countries. I suppose it's a little more natural than dubbing, in that at least you still hear the real audio slightly in the background rather than someone's lips moving wrongly.

This is a nice one to follow on YouTube. Not quite what we have been talking about but similar

It is Rogue States Media and shows many videos from TV in North Korea, Turkmenistan, South Sudan etc

https://www.youtube.com/user/RogueStatesMedia

Has anybody here watched TV in Socialist Albania ? I know it was cut off to the world for a number of years, a bit like a European North Korea. How did TV work there during this period ? I am guessing it was maybe Black and White for a number of years and probably only one or two channels with only a few hours a day.

The moment the dictator fell Albanian TV broadcast Chaplin's The Great Dictator - they must have had a copy stashed away somewhere. And of course Norman Wisdom was very popular and they showed his films frequently.When he paid a visit he was mobbed everywhere he went.

Documentary Fan mentions a few times in this thread about Yugoslavia being the most enlightened of the old communist countries. I have been reading Michael Palin Diaries lately and he talks of Yugoslavia been the first non English speaking country to take Monty Python

Interesting When was that?

Hi Karl, just looked it up. It wasn't in his diaries it was in his New Europe book but he doesn't say when.

Thanks anyway, Darren.

If Yugoslovia was the first country to show Flying Circus, it must have been somewhere between 1969 and 1971 because two specially produced German episodes were shown in West Germany in January and December 1972. The first one was especially noteworthy because the Pythons actually spoke (or tried to speak) German.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3ZSB5FPCF8

A couple of regular Flying Circus episodes were shown on regional channels in West Germany during the early 70s, The entire series wasn't shown until the early 90s - and it was never shown on East German TV.

A dubbed version of i]Fawlty Towers[/i], on the other hand, was broadcast by DDR-Fernsehen in 1987. It goes without saying that episode 6 ("The Germans") was omitted, as was episode 12 ("Basil the Rat"). In West Germany, the series was shown with subtitles.

GDR television's "Verkehrsmagazin" (traffic magazine) introduced the 1981 model of the Wartburg 353 in a lengthy 8-minute report...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NIGSrhQ1xg

Until the mid-70s, the car was exported to the UK as the "Wartburg Knight".

http://www.histoquariat.de/WebRoot/S...0CE5/14337.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3298/...da46063375.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1186/...79faac8883.jpg

A West German TV report about the 1958 Leipzig Trade Fair:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6stELlxnNvw

The Leipzig Fair was one of the most important marketplaces for trade within the Eastern Bloc and also for trade with capitalist countries.

Communist television from 2015: Kim Jong-un rides the Pyongyang Metro and shows off a "newly manufactured" underground train.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lYWc3Iq-nI

But according to German WIkipedia, this train is actually a refurbished/rebuilt one from Berlin. In 1997, North Korea bought decommissioned U-Bahn trains from both East and West Berlin. The trains from West Berlin are definitely still in use; one of them (painted in red and cream) can be seen in the video at 3:30.

"Du und dein Garten" was a gardening magazine. launched by DDR-Fernsehen in 1968. Here is a full episode from 1987:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsBENvcUSew

The programme survived German re-unification: East German broadcasters ORB and MDR continued to produce it until 2003. All 483 episodes were hosted by Erika Krause, a former kindergarten teacher. She retired in 2004, at the age of 80.

Thank you again Karl. Love the last link especially

Then you might like this one as well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTlX5UJ1zBM

It's the first episode of a magazine called "HAPS" from 1983. The title was an acronym: "Haushalts-Allerlei praktisch serviert" - something like "a household-potpourri, conveniently served".

This episode is entirely devoted to a single kitchen utensil: an electric hand mixer. The first studio guest was Comrade Müller, the general director of the state company that produced the mixer. Products from that company were sold and exported under the "AKA Electric" brand name. They also appeared in West German mail-order catalogues.

The host served a rather special drink to Comrade Müller: the "HAPS flip". Here's the recipe...

250ml of milk
375ml of red wine ("for that special fine and spicy taste")
330ml of beer
4 tbsp of sugar
1 whole egg
a pinch of black pepper

Cheers!

What a great theme tune

Can you Germans not have any meal or drink without some beer in it I remember going to Munich and on a lunchtime you would see people drinking a beer with their lunch much like we have a coffee. Mind you the beer is 10 times better than here anyway, like nectar.

In Bavaria, beer is known to be a staple food (Grundnahrungsmittel) rather than a drink. Beer for lunch is less common in other regions, except on weekends and of course in beer halls/brewpubs.

Finally I've found a full episode of "English for you":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DeYLQd-pDc

This language course was actually aimed at students (around 7th/8th grade I think) who learned English as their secondforeign language. Russian was mandatory as first foreign language for all East German pupils.

"English for you" accompanied schoolbooks under the same title. The programme consisted of 52 episodes that were shown over and over again in the early mornings and early afternoons. This version, filmed in b&w, was produced in 1978/79 and ran until the collapse of the GDR but there was also an earlier 1960s version.

In this case, Wikipedia is a good general resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_...zioni_Shqiptar

The transition to color apparently happened in the early 1980s.

Here's a long YouTube clip of Albanian TV from 1986, beginning with the weather forecast (the news starts at the 1:30:40 mark):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UQN4aPPoMw