Television: TV cult star in the 90s: Hermes Phettberg died

This offer has to come to mind first: “Eggnog or Frucade?” That was the bizarre tasting choice between creamy alcohol and sweet water that Hermes Phettberg offered the guests of his late-night parody “Phettberg’s Nette Leit Show”. In the 1990s, the corpulent Austrian was a kind of clever TV character – and therefore a cult figure. He shone with wit and reflected with brutal openness about his sexual fantasies, in which tight jeans and a cane played a central role. Late night talker Harald Schmidt appreciatively called it a “total work of art”. RTL wanted to have his show, but the deal fell through.

Then things became very quiet around one of the most dazzling Austrians. Isolated, impoverished and suffering from strokes, he became a sad anti-hero in a 2011 film documentary. According to his friend and carer Hannes Moser, Phettberg died on Wednesday in a Vienna clinic at the age of 72.

Phettberg described himself as a “publicist and wretch in Vienna.” In the documentary “The Pope is not a jeans boy” his misery becomes abundantly clear. In 2011, a hunchbacked, unkempt man shuffles through the picture in a chaotic apartment, reaching for the handcuffs that have been hanging in the living room for 30 years. One of the many clues to the central struggle in his life. “I actually come from sexuality,” said the self-confessed masochist, who liked to alienate or amuse his guests on television with his comments.

Sensational ratings

His show was actually a theater, the venue was a ballroom for the communist KPÖ in Vienna. First hundreds, then more than 1,000 people came to see the 150 kilogram man with long hair, a scarf and suspenders. The ORF added the “Nette Leit Show” to its program in 1995 and recorded sensational ratings.

The “Kronen Zeitung” was less likely to understand people’s fun: “With this unacceptable program, the ORF is diving dangerously into the depths of the unsavory and grindy. He needs a witless fatberg who plays dumb and makes no secret of his moldy left-wing preferences ORF not,” said the mass paper.

As a fat gay man with a penchant for sadomasochism, Phettberg provided striking proof that there were other people besides the beautiful, strong and capable who had something to say, said his director Kurt Palm. The “Spiegel” was enthusiastic: “When Phettberg speaks, what appears repulsive, the relentlessly disfigured body and the crooked mouth in the devastated face, fades into the aura of a gentle, poetically desperate person.”

This poet, who was a bank clerk when he was young, certainly couldn’t handle money. In his best year of 1995, he told the audience, he earned 900,000 schillings (around 65,000 euros), but in the end had a “liquidity bottleneck” of 70,000 schillings. He could have followed the call of money if he had accepted the offer from the broadcaster RTL. But they couldn’t agree on some details, Palm recalled.

Until the very end, Phettberg wrote a column that was both merciless and loving in the Viennese weekly newspaper “Falter”. “Every day the saliva is sucked out of my mouth, it’s unpleasant,” he reported in his last post from the clinic. “Merry, healthy and peaceful Christmas everywhere,” Phettberg, who was seriously ill, wished his readers shortly before his death.