Dinner for One

Dinner for One, also known as The 90th Birthday (German: Der 90. Geburtstag, Swedish: Grevinnan och betjänten), 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 in English by British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden. The sketch begins with an introduction in German, followed by the main act in English, and is available online.

Dinner for One
German Komplett Video VHS
Directed byHeinz Dunkhase
Written byLauri Wylie
Starring
Music byLew Pollack
Release date
  • 8 July 1963 (1963-07-08)
Running time
18 minutes
CountryWest Germany
LanguagesEnglish
(with German introduction)

It has become traditional viewing on New Year's Eve in European countries such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia, or on 23 December in Norway, and, as of 1995, was the most frequently repeated television programme in Germany. 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 the US.

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.

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