Hermes Phettberg: TV cult star from the 90s is dead

This offer must come to mind first: “Eggnog or Frucade?” That was the bizarre tasting choice between creamy alcohol and sweet water that Hermes Phettberg gave the guests of his late-night parody “Phettberg’s Nice Leit Show” offered. 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 called him appreciative “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 “Publicist and wretch in Vienna”. In the documentation “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.

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 lifted it “Nice leading show” It came onto the program in 1995 and recorded sensational ratings.

The “Crown newspaper” understood people’s fun less: “With this unacceptable broadcast, the ORF is diving dangerously into the depths of the unsavory and grindy. The ORF doesn’t need a witless fatberg who plays dumb and makes no secret of his moldy left-wing preferences”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 “Mirror” was thrilled: “When Phettberg speaks, what seems repulsive, the relentlessly disfigured body and the crooked mouth in the ravaged 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 he earned one “Liquidity shortage” of 70,000 shillings. 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 in the Viennese weekly newspaper that was both merciless and loving “butterfly”. “Every day the saliva is sucked out of my mouth, which is unpleasant”he reported in his last post from the clinic. “Merry, healthy and peaceful Christmas everywhere”the seriously ill Phettberg wished his readers shortly before his death.

Transparency note: The star is part of RTL Deutschland.