SYNOPSIS:
"Tell started all this television madness about chefs." - Regis Philbin
Germany's youngest Master Chef, Friedemann Paul Erhardt, faces an outdoor audition in Philadelphia for a cooking slot on what will be America's first syndicated television show. UScriptless and using his wit and personality alone, he wins, birthing a new culinary breed: the TV showman chef.
Within weeks, 40,000,000 avid fans tune in to Evening Magazine or PM Magazine to watch "Chef Tell" perform 90-second cooking segments three times a week. His persona, cooking knowledge, and humor sweep across the nation's small screens like a prairie fire! No one has ever seen anyone like him; he is a husky, 6'3", with a Fu-Manchu mustache, a thick German accent, and a quick wit.
PM Magazine's "rock-star chef" draws up to 50 percent market share in 95 percent of their syndicated outlets when Tell's ruggedly masculine appeal crosses gender and generational lines.
"If a housewife or man sees me do something in 90 seconds, they figure they can make it in five minutes," says Tell to reporters. And his fans agree!
Off-camera, Erhardt, having suffered the scars of his post-WWII childhood and, as a teenager, his mother's ignominious suicide, endures his second wife's suicide, sporadic drug use, and clandestine sexual encounters until he finds personal happiness with the one woman he knows he can trust implicitly and love boundlessly. He makes numerous appearances on LIVE! with Regis & Kathy Lee, other TV shows, and at convention center cooking events while operating two successful restaurants in the Greater Philadelphia area and another on Grand Cayman Island. Later, he begins production on an eponymous cooking show, In the Kitchen with Chef Tell. The show airs on PBS locally, pulls high ratings, and gets picked up on syndication. Yet, on Friday, October 26, 2007, Tell unexpectedly dies alone at home, leaving his wife Bunny to pick up the pieces of her life.
Messages of surprise and shock flood the internet, including this one: "Chef Tell has died? Stick a fork in him, he's done," which he would have loved.
(After the memorial service at his church, an open-air gathering at his estate finds over 300 guests and celebrities regaling each other with their favorite F-bomb-laden "Chef Tell" reminiscences before they bid their dear, lost friend, "AUF WIEDERSEHEN!"
