Of course, they were always right, the steamy commentators who are now full of Telegram: Angela Merkel has been behind everything for years, from the weather to the television crime flood, maliciously she controlled the thoughts of an entire country (which could hardly have dreamed how quickly it one more thing taught Drögeren that the rhetorical talent of the eternal Chancellor would wish back).

But even the guards didn't have one thing on their radar: that behind Merkel there was another, namely Sandro Zahlemann, a worn-out system frigate of the public broadcasters and known from the "Breakfast TV" (2013) or the "Sandro Report" (2016).

Like Merkel, he comes suspiciously from the East, and instead of the MDR logo is emblazoned with “ddr” on his microphone.

Switching reports of horror paved its way in and out of the ARD.

Of course, he fell, a rarity today, not over a stupid tweet, but over his own feet.

Two left, of course, as always with ARD.

How he got Angela Merkel's number

Now he unpacks, at the worst airtime on the first: Sandro Zahlemann, victim of a kind of reverse identity theft, i.e. an identity overlay. Some time ago he was assigned a no longer used number via his local mobile phone mafia outlet, which, however, happened to be a discarded one by the Chancellor. And because nobody, least of all celebrities, erases old numbers from their mobile phones, Zahlemann soon made smart politics, so Hinz and Kunz from Deutschland GmbH answered as "AM", mistaking the Horsts (Lichter and Seehofer) and almost betraying themselves in a message to Wolfgang “Fresse” Bosbach, but anyone who believes that hints of the size of a fist lead to consequences does not know the political Berlin well.

At the end of the year we now find out who, for example, gave Markus Söder the order to retreat via SMS in order to clear the field for “Armin”, and also why this actually happened. It goes back to Zahlemann's years at Bayerischer Rundfunk. At that time, the volunteer, the handsome Markus, gave him a gitta by means of tight dancing, which is quite believable, because the (few) editors were actually called Gitta in the early 1990s. Many other things are now also being discovered. Especially since behind Zahlemann there is someone who is really behind everything.

It is well known that a year cannot end without a new episode of Olli Dittrich's “TV cycle”. What trashy, beautiful TV pearls this has given us over the past nine years! As Beckenbauer's doppelganger Schorsch Aigner, Dittrich delighted us, as a stone-age master reporter Sigmar Seelenbrecht, as Trixie Dörfel, that tragic Austroschlager chanteuse with a raccoon-tick, and everything about the celebrity and talk formats always seemed real down to the smallest detail. This creative misuse of formats characterizes the series even more than the role parodic: a meta-reflective tabloid junkie under the sign of hyperrealism, which at the same time looks like an overdue exorcism. However, like someone who doesn't work. Because although it seems almost unthinkablethat after such a massive corruption the cozy formats simply continue to run as before, they do exactly that. Maybe you just want to continue to provide Dittrich with templates.

How meticulously the great persiflagist depicts the vain television German of the “magazines”, this linguistically awkward boasting (“I am, as far as I can definitely hang out of the window here, if at all I am only a complicit person, basically I sacrifice "), how coherent the off-lyrics are (" We ask an expert ") and how cheap the tension music background is true to the original, that can only be admired again. And yet the program hangs by a thread out of the window, to put it in a way that is compatible with tomorrow's magazines, namely where identity theft is avoided: with the many cameo appearances of real screen-filling faces. If Caren Miosga, Tom Buhrow, Robin Alexander or Horst Lichter want to be funny by playing themselves (they "show humor",it says parodistically in the announcement), nothing works anymore because they are neither funny nor themselves.

How much better, funnier and more genuine, how much barer and rarer it would have been, had Dittrich, gladly again with Cordula Stratmann at his side, transformed into Miosga or Buhrow.

No “Welt am Sonntag” free subscription can help with that, with which Sandro, who, broken as he is, would also be satisfied with print, is fobbed off at a backroom mess with Robin Alexander.

Nevertheless, this “protocol” remains a pleasure that not even a boring Wolfgang Bosbach can spoil us.

What Dittrich-Zahlemann, the one-eyed among the blind spots, suggests at the very end: "With the first one you can see well", that actually applies to this night.

I was Angela Merkel - the Zahlemann protocol

runs today, December 29th, at 11:15 p.m. in the first.