The entertainer Alfred Biolek is dead. He died on Friday morning, as his adoptive son Scott Biolek-Ritchie told the German press agency.
The former TV presenter and talk show host fell asleep peacefully in his Cologne apartment.
Biolek had been in poor health for a long time.
He was 87 years old.
The son of a lawyer, Biolek, was born in Freistadt - now the Czech Republic - in 1934 and lived a sheltered childhood in an upper-class Catholic home.
After the war, the family fled to the West, and like his father, Biolek studied law and obtained a doctorate in law.
Biolek's career would be unthinkable today: he started as a legal advisor at the newly founded ZDF in 1963, but soon after switched to the editorial office.
When he first appeared in front of the camera, he gave “tips for drivers”.
In 1970 he came to WDR in Cologne, where he developed the Saturday evening show "Amlauf Band" with Rudi Carrell, the most successful show of the 1970s.
At the same time, he gained his first experience of moderation at the “Kölner Treff” and in 1978 got his own program, “Bio's Bahnhof”.
After that he was constantly present on German television for 30 years.
His talk show "Boulevard Bio" alone ran for twelve years.
His era only ended in 2007 with the last episode of the cooking show "Alfredissimo", in which he had stood at the stove with guests for many years, chatting and tasting wine.
"My time is over now," he said at the time.
In 2010, he suffered severe skull injuries when he fell off a spiral staircase and fell into a coma.
Since then he had lived quite withdrawn in Cologne.
On his eightieth birthday in 2014, the FAZ said about the work of Biolek: “Alfred Biolek sketched the main lines of today's television and noticed that something was wrong at some point.
The conversation turned into the talk, the meeting at the stove turned into the kitchen fight.
What was perfectly shaped at Biolek got out of hand. "