November 2022
Steven Fawkes

I am Steven Fawkes, now a Trustee and volunteer for Association for Language Learning (ALL). I first began to work with the Goethe-Institut London when I was in post at BBC Education as Schools Education Officer for Languages in the early '90s. At the same time, my involvement with ALL was growing, and collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London was part of that, too.

The BBC and Goethe-Institut were partners in creating three television series for schools in which I was closely involved, alongside Goethe-Institut London colleagues: Susanne, D-Mag and of course Hallo aus Berlin. 

Rolli and Rita won an award for innovative animation technology, and their performances of the songs are still live on YouTube, nearly 30 years later. I strongly deny however that I was in any way involved with the choreography! Over 20 years later, I was still working with Goethe-Institut London colleagues in the project team who created The Language Magician.

Over the years of working with different colleagues at Goethe-Institut London, it has become obvious that several of them liked to give me a challenge (knowing me well enough to realise I cannot resist that!).

One was to be the reader of a prize-winning translation from German to English at the prize event. That doesn't sound much, but the original German text was about football fans and their enjoyment of a team win... In consequence, the language in English contained many words in what the television now calls adult language, words my mouth had never uttered aloud in public before! 
 
The other was an invitation to chair a debate between two Berlin journalists who had jointly written a book about the Ossi-Wessi tensions in the late 90s. It was to be in English, as the audience was mixed, but there were a lot of German speakers present in a packed room. All went well until the woman journalist (in fact they were a married couple) suddenly became very animated and said 'I can't say what I want to say in English. You'll have to translate!' followed by a torrent of impassioned German that seemed to go on for paragraphs! So my challenge then, in front of native speakers and bilingual people, was to try to pick out the main elements of her tirade and translate them. I definitely needed a Kölsch after that!