What Was Tutti Frutti

 For a non-German who might have heard the name of this TV show, but no idea what it was.....a brief introduction.

In the early glory days of RTL (the first commercial TV network)....in January of 1990 came this evening show called 'Tutti Frutti'. 

RTL, unlike ZDF or ARD (the public TV networks) was going after younger viewers, and wanted to be known as the anti-intellectual network.

So Tutti Frutti was a weekly gameshow.  There were 140 episodes by the time they ended it in the spring of 1993.

Length?  45 minutes.

It ran on Sunday evenings (late) for the first season.  As I remember it....by season, it flipped to Friday evenings.  Season three jumped back and forth from Friday to Saturday.

So the emphasis of the game....was erotic stuff (boobs, jokes, strip-tease, etc).  Contestants?  They were both male and female.  

Winning anything?  Well....typically the big winner of the night would walk away with 3,000 DM's.....roughly $1,500.....which was a big deal in the early 1990s.

Here's the thing about it....it was clearly drawing a ton of advertising revenue in for the new network, and ensured their survival in the first couple of years.

As much as you can say that it was 'crazy' stuff for TV.....West Germany in this era of 1970s/1980s....was full of hyped-up sex via newspapers and red-light districts.  Things are way more conservative today, than it was forty years ago.  

Why it ended?  It was a hot fad, that came and went.  

You can bring up Tutti Fruitti with most Germans who are over 60, the bulk of them will admit that they watched a number of episodes.  They might say it was pretty silly, but highly erotic in nature.  If you asked if a show like this could survive today?  They'd laugh and say no.  

Their success, I think....was hooked up to a 'limit'.  It was pure strip-tease stuff, with a few boobs shown, and highly suggestive jokes.  That was it.  And I should note....they copied the format from Italian TV from the late 1980s.