Happy 85th Birthday Chris Howland

John Christopher Howland was born on July 30, 1928 in London, England. He is a British radio and TV presenter. For most of his career he worked in Germany, where he started a few years after World War II at BFBS. He became a popular disk jockey and presenter also on German networks. He also was a prolific Schlager-singer and starred in over 50 films and television appearances.

 
In 1948 he started working for the British Forces Broadcasting Service in Germany. The British programs were an insider tip for German youths who would rather listen to British music than to the comparatively slow contemporary German pop music. So his popularity subsequently soon exceeded his actual target audience. On the other hand Chris Howland also got acquainted with the German language. In 1952, when he already spoke German fluently, he was hired by a German broadcaster. Because of him British music prevails on German radio up to now. Still, when he debuted six years later as a singer, he did it in Germany and had two hits. But in 1959 he stopped doing radio shows and returned to Britain.
 
On British TV Chris Howland had a show called ‘Peoples and Places’ but he was not as popular as in Germany where the audiences loved his British accent. So after two years he returned to Germany and continued his career. Here he did a show called ‘Studio B’ which featured pop stars in a new way that included a lot of humor. The show was broadcast more than sixty times. Chris Howland's next coup was a version of Candid Camera for German TV.
 
Since 1954 Chris Howland has acted in more than twenty films, including six European Karl May films including three westerns: “Apache Gold” (1963) as Lord Jefferson Tuff Tuff, “Legacy of the Incas” (1965) as Don Parmesan and “Blood at Sundown” (1966) as Doodle Kramer. In 2007 he appeared in a parody on German Edgar Wallace feature films. He acted mainly in comedies which were carried out in a style much like the British Carry On films.
 
Currently Chris Howland lives outside Cologne, Germany and works again as a radio presenter and appears occasionally as an actor or speaker on TV. In 2009 he published his memoirs Yes, Sir.
 
Today we celebrate Chris Howland’s 85^th birthday.