Last but not least: When the Valentine's Day interview gets out of hand
It was actually supposed to be just a little Valentine's Day survey—the kind that almost every local station is conducting these days. But things turned out quite differently.
Surely he has a sweetheart at home, the young reporter opens the conversation with an elderly passer-by. The gentleman does not put up with this. He rejects these insinuations, he counters. It was a journalistic trick. Such insinuations should not occur in a free and democratic constitutional order. And what follows could easily be an excerpt from a good cabaret - the man talks about the dictates of the date, the trembling of the globe and the neuroses of the reporter. American holidays in general go against the grain, the leap year also annoys him, and the opening hours of the banks anyway.
The YouTube clip has already been viewed well over 500,000 times. Anyone who thinks the man is an actor is wrong. When asked by Spiegel.de, the local broadcaster TV Leipzig assured us that the man was a normal passer-by who the reporter, herself a working student, happened to get in front of the microphone during her street survey. They had not seriously considered offering him a regular program slot for his tirades - they didn't even know the man's name.
