Tutti Frutti, Oh Rudy

So. Last night I was minding my own business and watching an old episode of Real Sex on HBO with my husband. Generally I would consider this a totally normal way for a married couple to spend a weekday night; the 'sex' - such as it is - on the show is usually pretty tame, and I typically find it more humorous than erotic in its depictions of alternate sexual practices.

After watching the first segment, dealing with a group of black erotic dancers called The Rumpshakers, I was relatively bored. The second segment, a group of middle-aged men and women who gathered together for mutual masturbation parties, was vaguely surreal. All in all, it was shaping up to be a rather lukewarm episode of the documentary series. Then came the ultimate segment concerning a German game show called Tutti Frutti.

Holy naked Deutschlanders, Batman!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I spent three and a half years living in the land of schnitzel and wurst; as such, I consider myself fairly savvy in my understanding of all things German. I'm familiar with the food. I can speak a smidgen of the language. I've traveled much of the country. I've seen many of the programs available on German television - I even watched the Eurovision song contest two years in a row. But I had never seen anything like this. Otherwise normal, early nineties era German folk stripping to their skivvies as part of some ridiculous quiz show. The tag line? "When the contestants lose, the audience wins!"

Trust me when I would say, as a member of the audience, that I would MUCH rather lose. These were normal folks. And if there's one truism about normal folks and nakedness it's this: unless you happened to be married to that particular married folk at that particular time, you really don't want to see them naked. It is horribly, terribly, cosmically WRONG.