Today I visited the KiKa Summer Tour in Wiesbaden with my daughter.  This was our third visit to one of the tour events, having visited Wiesbaden and Cologne in previous years.

With temperatures forecast for around 30°C it was the perfect day for it, even though there was a chance of thunder storms in the afternoon.

Juri and Singa welcome the cast onto the stage

The amount of attractions laid on had either increased in number compared to the event two years ago, or were spread out more.  I certainly felt that there were not as many people there as there had been two years ago, but maybe that really was due to having a larger area and two different stages.  Certainly the queue to climb up “Bernd das Brot” was not as long!

The audience in front of the main stage

In fact, the queues are the worst part of the day – that being reminded with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) hints that KiKa is funded by the license fee.

Everything else is well done for the children.  There is an area in front of the main stage where only children can enter.  On entering, the mobile phone number of one of their parents is written on their arm, so that when they want to leave, the crew can contact someone.  Obviously the phone needs to be turned on and audible for this to work!

But this year, for the first time I saw the security crew making sure that the smaller children got to the front of that area so that they could see, and also that the children were offered water to drink whilst they were in there and out of the reach of their parents.

The active stage

The smaller “active” stage is lower, so that the children really can go almost up to close to it.  At one point, a number of children – including my daughter – were allowed onto this stage to dance!

And dancing certainly was the order of the day.  We danced to the A-E-I-O-U song a total of 4 times, with my daughter having the slight advantage that we had practised the steps together the previous day!

Towards the end of the afternoon with less than an hour to go until the finale, the thunder finally arrived and aptly interrupted the Tabaluga show, whose cast were slightly caught off guard by the fact that it wasn’t their thunder sound effect!  It rained for about 10 minutes, and then stopped for all of the stars to gather on the main stage for one last dance.

The summer tour is well worth a visit.  On the way home my daughter cited dancing on the active stage with the presenters Juri and Singa as her favourite part of the day, with meeting Juri himself (to have a CD autographed) coming a close second.

Depending on which channel you are watching, there are times when it feels that there is more advertising than programming.  Of course, that’s not usually the case, and in fact there are strict rules governing advertising on television.

The first main difference between Germany and a many other countries is that even public service broadcasters are allowed to supplement their license fee income with advertising.

They are, however, only allowed to do this from Monday to Saturday before 8pm, and not on public holidays.  After 8pm some programmes may still have sponsors.

They also intersperse the individual adverts with short animations, most notably the Mainzelmännchen on ZDF.

Private channels on the other hand can show advertisements at any time of the day and on any day.

However even then some rules apply:

1. the advertisements may not take up more than 12 minutes per hour of airtime
2. the commercial breaks must be at least 20 minutes apart
3. programmes for children may not have commercial breaks, only commercials between the programmes
4. special rules apply for films – here the number of commercial breaks is defined by the length of the film

I think I’m going to try and see if the channels really do keep to these rules.  I have to admin, that at the moment I hardly see any advertisements, as I record most programmes to watch later in the evening, so I just skip over them!

(Photo ©iStockphoto.com/esemelwe)

Every year on Remembrance Sunday I sit down at 11:45 to watch the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph in London, and from year to year doing so is getting more and more difficult.

Obviously this is a ceremony that is not shown on German television.  Germany itself has its Remembrance Sunday (Volkstrauertag) a week later.  For them, the 10th of November is the day to remember the Kristallnacht of 1938 when jewish shops and synagogues were attacked throughout Germany.  The 11th of November is the start of the carnival season!

When I first arrived in Germany I was able to watch the ceremony each year on Sky News via satellite.  Indeed, in those years the English bookshop in Frankfurt even collected for the Poppy Appeal.  But when Sky switched to digital I was no longer able to receive them.

For a few years I was able to watch on “BBC World” on cable, but where I now live this is not available on Sundays.

So for many years I gave been glued to my computer screen and have watched the ceremony in a small window on the BBC News website.

But not today.  After waiting for the link to the live feed to appear, just before 12:00 I started looked for alternatives.

First I tried the BBC World Service, and was at least able to hear the audio feed.  Then at 12:03, just as the Last Post was sounding, the “live” button appeared on the BBC News website.  But alas, when I clicked on it I received the message “Sorry, this media is not available in your territory”!

I tried the BBC News International site, but there was not even a mention of Remembrance Sunday on it!

Finally, I visited the Sky News website and found what I had been looking for: a large “Live Video” graphic.  So I watched the end of the wreath-laying and the service online via Sky News.  It was a good thing that I found this feed, as at around 12:15 the BBC World Service moved on to “World Briefing”.

So thank you to Sky for broadcasting this important piece of British history over the internet, and shame on you BBC for blocking viewers outside the UK!