In the early 2000s, there was a revamp of the Intervilles format across several parts of Europe. This resulted in ITV’s Simply the Best in the UK in 2004, Deutschland Champions (Germany’s Champions) in Germany in 2003 and 2004 and in Portugal, Campeões Nacionais (National Champions) in 2003. It even made it to South Africa, as Summer Games and Crazy Games (2006-2009). In the UK and Germany, the programme was to be a full evening’s entertainment, where in addition to the sporting competition, popular singers and bands would also perform.

The teams involved were made up of 7 members, one of whom was a personality, actor/actor, performer or celebrity of some kind from the competing town or city. They would join in, either by answering questions on a roller coaster or whilst holding a balloon slowly inflating for example, or sometimes within the actual physical competition. In all these versions, the teams would compete in a variety of games and build up points in order to gain an advantage in the final game, in what the UK was called the Champions' Wall or in South Africa, the Ratchet. This was a form of ladder which had to be ascended by a competitor using a pole to haul themselves up with. This in effect turned the whole competition into a test to see which team had the male contestants with the most upper body strength. The Wall would be a format repeated in later years as well, in other versions.

Mistral Productions produced Deutschland Champions for ARD, the company which had produced Spiel Ohne Grenzen back in heyday of Jeux Sans Frontieres. It was filmed at Europa-Park in Rust, in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany’s largest theme park, and the second most visited park in Europe. This venue would also be used for the French domestic series Intervilles in 2004. The presenters of Deutschland Champions in 2003 were Sabrina Staubitz (a popular actor), Gerd Rubenbauer (famous as a sports commentator) and Micro Nontschew (a comedian), with Alexander Mazza (actor and presenter) replacing Nontschew for the 2004 series. The referee, certainly for the 2004 series, was the German international football referee, Peter Sippel.

The programmes in 2003 were all ‘stadt deull’, (city/town duels), competitions between areas sometimes perceived to be rivals. The first heat was billed as ‘Gipfelstürmer gegen Wellenreiter’ (mountaineers vs. surfers). Here Garmisch-Partenkirchen, hosts of the 1936 Winter Olympics in the Alps, in south eastern Germany, took on Sylt, a fashionable seaside resort in the north west of the country, in Schleswig-Holstein. This type of competition was not new to Sylt however, as in 1972 competing as Westerland, they had not only taken part in the domestic version of Spiel Ohne Grenzen, but they had hosted an international heat of Jeux Sans Frontieres and got to the Final as well that year. Team members for Garmisch-Partenkirchen included Christian Neureuther and Rossi Mittermaier, German international skiers, while Petra Reiber the Burgomeister for Sylt also competed. Heat 2 saw Frankfurt an der Order, in Brandenburg, take on Frankfurt am Main from Hessen, while Heat 3 was a contest between River Rhine rivals, Düsseldorf and Köln (Cologne). The final heat that year was a battle between the present and former capital cities, Berlin and Bonn. Like Sylt, Bonn had also experience of this sort of event, as they had hosted an international heat of Jeux Sans Frontieres in 1979 and gotten to the Final that year as well.

The 2004 series became an inter-state competition. Heat 1 saw Bayern (Bavaria) beat Hamburg, Rheinland Plafz (Rhineland-Palatinate) and Saxony. Heat 2 was a victory for Thüringen (Thüringia) over Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommen and Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia). Baden-Württemberg beat Berlin, Sachsen-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein in Heat 3, with Saarland beating Brandenburg, Hessen (Hesse) and Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony). The final saw Thüringen beat Barden-Wüttenberg, Saarland and Bayern. Whilst Thüringen went out on a high at the end of the 2004 series, for the Deutschland Champions series as a whole the news was not so good, as it did not return in 2005.

by Paul Leaver