''Graf Yoster gibt sich die Ehre'' (French title: ''Le comte Yoster a bien l'honneur'') – which translates to English as ''Count Yoster has the Honour'' – was a television series produced between 1967 and 1976. Starring

Lukas Ammann Lukas Ammann (29 September 1912 – 3 May 2017) was a Swiss people, Swiss actor who appeared mainly in German and Swiss films and television shows. He continued to work steadily for over 60 years. He is best known for his title role in the ...

and Wolfgang Völz, the series followed the adventures of the titular aristocratic

gentleman detective The gentleman detective is a type of fictional character. He (or she) has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in the United Kingdom in the Golden Age. While not necessarily aristocracy, the ...

and his working-class butler. It was a success, in particular in

West Germany West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...

and in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

. Originally the show was a West German production in

black-and-white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white to produce a range of achromatic brightnesses of grey. It is also known as greyscale in technical settings. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, ...

but it evolved into a

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

an co-production in colour.

Main character

plays Graf (Count) Yoster, who is presented as an impeccable gentleman. He wore a traditional suit and bowler hat, and carried an umbrella, similar to

John Steed Major The Hon. John Wickham Gascoyne Beresford Steed usually known as John Steed, is a fictional character and the central protagonist on the 1960s British spy series '' The Avengers'' and its 1970s sequel '' The New Avengers'', played by Patric ...

in the TV series '' The Avengers''. Although he lived in a castle in

Bavaria Bavaria, officially the Free State of Bavaria, is a States of Germany, state in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the list of German states by area, largest German state by land area, comprising approximately 1/5 of the total l ...

(where, especially in the beginning, a great deal of the show was shot) he had no Bavarian accent and his appearance was as British as his Rolls-Royce.

Sidekick

Wolfgang Völz played Ioan (or in German: Johann), the count's

butler A butler is a person who works in a house serving and is a domestic worker in a large household. In great houses, the household is sometimes divided into departments, with the butler in charge of the dining room, wine cellar, and pantries, pantr ...

and

chauffeur A chauffeur () is a person employed to drive a passenger motor vehicle, especially a luxury vehicle such as a large sedan or a limousine. Initially, such drivers were often personal employees of the vehicle owner, but this has changed to s ...

. The idea that a butler could be a hero was for German audiences already established by Butler Parker. Ioan would sometimes engage in investigations and then bring the count up to speed on the case as well as literally while h
drove the count's Rolls-Royce
Moreover, he would instantly transform into the count's bodyguard whenever anybody endangered the count's well-being by trying to approach him in an inappropriate manner. Ioan applied his highly efficient close-combat techniques in a very businesslike way, completely different from any Hollywood boxing or Hong Kong martial arts style, and rather resembled the way British soldiers are taught to tackle similar situations. He was portrayed as a man of modest origins and it was repeatedly implied that he had been entangled in criminal activities before entering the count's employ.

Genre

Graf Yoster was very much an amateur detective in the tradition of Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey. His cases were accordingly

whodunit A ''whodunit'' (less commonly spelled as ''whodunnit''; a colloquial elision of "Who asdone it?") is a complex plot-driven variety of detective fiction Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an criminal ...

s although in the end Ioan would frequently have to give him a hand disarming the detected offenders.

Directors

Among the directors was Imo Moszkowicz, who had also directed a German TV series starring Josef Meinrad as

Father Brown Father Brown is a fictional Roman Catholic priest and amateur detective. He is featured in 53 short stories by English author G. K. Chesterton, published between 1910 and 1936. Father Brown solves mysteries and crimes using his intuition and ...

Guest stars (selection)

External links

*
Krimi Homepage (German only)
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101223082101/http://krimiserien.heimat.eu/g/graf_yoster_gibt_sich_die_ehre.htm , date=2010-12-23

* ttp://beatrice.romand.free.fr Homepage of Béatrice Romand Black-and-white television shows German crime television series 1960s German television series 1967 German television series debuts 1977 German television series endings German-language television shows Das Erste original programming