We all know who's coming to dinner

German television viewers don't have to sit through Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory each Christmas, but they do have their own cruel and unusual torture to endure. Every New Year's Eve since 1963, Germany's six regional television stations have screened an 11-minute comedy sketch called Dinner for One and this year will be no different. The film is entirely in English and has no subtitles, yet every year people crowd round televisions in a bizarre ritual to watch what has become a television classic.

The history of the film goes back to 1962 when German television producers scouting Blackpool variety theatres for talent and came across music hall star Freddy Frinton.

They persuaded Frinton to come to Hamburg to record the sketch Dinner for One in which he plays James, the butler at the 90th-birthday dinner of Miss Sophie, a dowager in denial of the fact that all her regular dinner guests are all long dead.

"The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?" asks James. "The same procedure as every year, James," replies Miss Sophie before each toast. The lines are quoted affectionately year-round by Germans in the same way that some of us quote Monty Python's Parrot Sketch. The "procedure" involves Miss Sophie making a toast while James goes around the table, assuming the roles of her dead dinner guests and knocking back all four drinks.

With each toast James becomes more drunk and finds it increasingly difficult to refill the glasses, serve dinner and avoid tripping over the tiger-skin rug. Some 37 years after they started showing it, German television stations have no intention of stopping. "We wouldn't dare not show it and we don't have plans to stop showing it, it never has been more popular," says Ute Forenholz, entertainment producer at NDR, the Hamburg-based television that instigated the tradition in 1963.

The film is inescapable on New Year's Eve. In nightclubs, it is projected onto the walls, while others hold Dinner for One parties, eating the same menu of Mulligatawny soup and North Sea haddock and dressing up as one of the four imaginary dinner guests - Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr Pommeroy and "dear Mr Winterbottom!"

Even foreigners in Germany have grown to love the film. "If you look at it in the cold light of day, the sketch is only mildly amusing, but on New Year's Eve, after a few drinks, it really is riotous," says Alistair Birch from Cambridge, who has been living in Berlin for 10 years. Germans themselves are generally at a loss to explain the popularity of Dinner for One, but already they are anticipating New Year's Eve, their dinner date with James and Miss Sophie and the same procedure as every year.