Dinner for One (1963) on Netflix
Miss Sophie celebrates her 90th birthday with the dinner she gives every year. Her four invited friends are long dead, so her butler James takes each guest's part and drinks their toasts.
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- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb8.0/108,906 votes
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Plot summary
Miss Sophie, an elderly upper-class Englishwoman, holds a birthday dinner every year for her four closest friends: Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr Pomeroy and Mr Winterbottom. All four have died, so her manservant James impersonates each guest in turn. Miss Sophie chooses a drink for every course: sherry with mulligatawny soup, white wine with North Sea haddock, champagne with chicken and port with the fruit. James must raise a glass to her four times per course, once in each guest's name. The repeated toasts soon show, and his stately manner gives way; he slops the drinks, once drinks from a flower vase, and stumbles over the tiger skin on the floor between the table and the buffet.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dinner for One (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sweden suspended the sketch for six years after its first screening, judging it unsuitable because of the butler James's heavy drinking, and only brought it back when the network gave in to popular demand; it has aired every year since 1976, except in 2004 after the Indian Ocean tsunami.
- After the sketch's success on the continent, Norddeutscher Rundfunk offered it to the BBC, but the BBC turned it down, saying it did not meet BBC quality standards.
- Although it began as a British stage sketch, its first national British television airing came only on New Year's Eve 2018, on Sky Arts; a year earlier it had been screened by the Grimsby local channel Estuary TV.
- The sketch's comic premise, a man drinking round after round and getting comically drunk, is generally credited to American actor Red Skelton, who used a similar routine in vaudeville from 1928 and allowed Lucille Ball to use the premise in the I Love Lucy episode "Lucy Does a TV Commercial".
- A 1992 color version, filmed in Frankfurt's festival hall with Bodo Maria and Macha Stein, was dedicated to the UFA star Camilla Horn, who had been meant to play Miss Sophie but had to withdraw because of illness.
- Because live TV shows could not be recorded with the technology of the time, a version was staged in front of a live audience at NDR's Studio B in Hamburg's Lokstedt quarter and taped over five days, from 30 April to 4 May 1963.
- The line "Same procedure as every year", kept in the original English, became a popular catchphrase in Germany, entering everyday vocabulary and appearing in newspaper headlines and advertisements; the same happened in Norway, Denmark and Sweden.
- In January 2021 Google added an easter egg to its Knowledge Panel for the sketch: a tiger's head that, when clicked, showed James running across the screen and tripping over it, plus sound clips including "Same procedure as every year, James."
