Dinner for One

***Dinner for One***, also known as ***The 90th Birthday*** (German: *Der 90. Geburtstag*), is a two-hander comedy sketch, written by British author Lauri Wylie for the theatre. After featuring on the stage, the German TV broadcaster, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) recorded the sketch in 1962 as an 18-minute black-and-white videotape recording, performed by British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden.

It has become traditional viewing on New Year's Eve in European countries such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, 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 the UK. It was broadcast on New Year's Eve in Britain on Sky Arts from 2018 to 2020.

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. The article "*Dinner for One*: The greatest cult film you've never heard of", published in 2018, investigates the reason for its obscurity.

In 2003, 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.

Plot

Heinz Piper introduces the story as the conferencier: Miss Sophie (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 (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 "Oooh! 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!" (Swedish 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.