November 2000
Fine Tuning
TV moderator Inez Sharp salts her life to taste
When television moderator Inez Sharp was a girl living in Essex, England, she attended a European school. With a German mother and an English father, she stood out at her English kindergarten. Bullying classmates decided they didn’t like having a “Nazi” in their kindergarten. “My mother was very homesick back then,” smiles Sharp (38). “So, she dressed my sister and me in dirndls and gave us ‘Heidi’ braids. It wasn’t hard for the other kids to detect our German side.” It would seem that dual-citizen Sharp, now a successful TV personality, translator, writer and English teacher, has turned early childhood trauma into a glowing asset.
Step In is the name of the current affairs program for which Sharp is responsible, a 15-minute English-language tutorial aired on Bayern 3 and its sister channel Bayern Alpha. For the last five years, the Munich transplant has been at the helm of the soon-to-be-cancelled special interest show. “I had no prior experience,” admits Sharp, “but since applying for the job I’ve become an anchor, producer, director and writer. I can’t do the camera work because I have to stand in front of it!” Four spots with predominantly British themes make up the quarter-hour informational language lesson. From pieces on English politics to interviews with feminist author Betty Friedan and supermarket mogul/bio-technologist/ politician Lord Sainsbury, Sharp helps Bavarians polish their high school English while imparting insights on the UK.
The fact that “her baby” will be dropped from the B3 roster in December does not surprise the ambitious announcer. “The show would thrive if a bigger audience were to be targeted,” confides Sharp. “But for that, the Bayerische Rundfunk would have to spend millions. As it is now,
Step In is shown at a time when few are watching.” [14:15, Mondays and Fridays] We’ve got one toe in the schools and one toe in the native-speaking market, and that’s not enough.” Sharp is unsure as to why foreign-language programming is rapidly being banished from German television, but agrees that it could be, in part, a bit of a cultural identity crisis caused by the emminent employment of the Euro.
Sharp’s parents encouraged her to forgo her deep desire to study design and major in something “less frivolous” than the arts. Although she graduated in 1985 from the University of London with honors and a B.A. degree in German and politics, Sharp soon began her life as a jill-of-all-trades. After teaching English in Munich for one miserable year — “I hated Munich back then!”— and working for a few years in Frankfurt, the now divorced mother of one headed for Tokyo with her husband, a Goethe Institute employee. “It was in Japan that I was able to focus on my passion for design,” smiles Sharp. “I signed up for a course on furniture design at the university but my application was turned down because the director felt that by the time my Japanese was good enough to understand the material I’d be heading back to Europe.” Acting on the tip of a bystander, the ambitious Englishwoman applied for a position as a teacher for a class on design history — to be taught in her mother tongue. “I had no experience for that job,” laughs Sharp. “So, in the summer before the course was scheduled to begin, I flew to Paris and London, went to all the important museums, and taught myself the material I would use in Tokyo. It was really wonderful, I learned by teaching.”
A second stab at her most loathed city came in 1994, when Sharp returned to Munich. In addition to the
Step In gig, the skeptic-turned-
München-lover plays a role in
Spotlight magazine’s “Peggy’s Place,” the audio cassette soap starring local jazz singer Jenny Evans. She also translates and teaches English courses for major corporations and enjoys time with her eight-year-old son Zooey. While some city residents have never tuned in to
Step In, many recognize Sharp at the most inopportune moments. “I once witnessed a shoplifting,” chuckles the TV personality. “Just as I might have reported the thief, the cashier said ‘Hey! Aren’t you on that show on Bayern 3?’ giving the guy enough time to escape. Another time I was on a tram and a passenger began having an epileptic seizure. An onlooker asked me if I was the one from TV instead of helping the man!” Won’t Sharp miss her one-woman show when cancellation time comes around? “Knowing me, I wouldn’t be surprised if, a year from now, I were in a completely different line of work,” grins Sharp. Ever eager to master new careers, the bicultural woman with the Spanish first name seems to have little trouble designing her life. <<
