Erstes Allgemeines Babenhäuser Pfarrer(!)-Kabarett - Kettensegen im Greis-Saal

Egon Krenz under Erich Honecker was in roughly the same position as Prince Charles under Queen Elizabeth II: he spent most of his life lurking in the wings. Friedrich Merz, too, had to wait an entire Angela Merkel - which felt like an eternity - before getting his shot at the chancellorship. Succession needs to be managed.

Catholics believe, for instance, that their priest received his professional qualification - ordination - directly from the Apostle Peter through an unbroken chain of blessings stretching back roughly 1,992 years. That sounds, of course, completely mad, which is why it gets dressed up as "apostolic succession" - because Latin used to be roughly as impressively mysterious as the word "algorithm" is today: something nobody really understands but everyone assumes must be enormously important. Papal elections are a good example. Elderly men get locked in a brightly painted chapel and aren't let out until a chamberlain in a funny uniform burns the ballots together with potassium chlorate to produce "fumus albus" - white smoke.

Anyone smiling smugly at this is very much mistaken. Being old-fashioned is an underrated weapon - it could be the meteorite that smashes Elon Musk's Mars rockets to pieces. Who will succeed Donald Trump? Goofy? Or, for a change, an actual human being? The world doesn't have to keep getting more absurd just because it keeps spinning.

In their 17th programme, "Erstes Allgemeines Babenhäuser Pfarrer(!)-Kabarett" asks how much power lies in resisting the modern. Anyone who finds themselves thinking about their grandmother's carbon footprint or the circumstances of their first French kiss is probably on the right track.