Joey's in town, Gail's struggling
From Today Stabroek News introduces a new column which will appear on Wednesdays
The nation must not worry. One night of watching local programming shows the industry is alive and kicking... mostly at each other. CN Sharma's show on Friday night was another masterpiece of unintentional comedy. His guest in the slightly shabby grey studio was a woman from Nigeria who had worked for a man on Middle Street for 4 months without getting paid. It appears this must be normal practice in her home country as she never asked her boss for her huge salary of $2000 per week. Sharma sat puzzled but patiently ,through her sad story " yes...yes....yes...". At times he fiddled with his glasses when it was a little boring, before it was time for his learned verdict . " This is abuse of women!" By now the poor lady's head was buried in her chest but a frantic zoom-in failed to capture any tears. Sharma then picked out his victims for the night -several feminist organisations and lambasted them for not helping women. He then asked the lady to give her obviously expert advice to all the women out there working without pay. He was not talking about housewives. She just mumbled something about perseverance and the Almighty. Sharma: And thank you for watching. Up came the music " Oh my God where have you gone, come into this world and see what is going on! What was going on at Channel 4 was an interview with Joey Jagan . Jagan , dressed in a bright orange outfit was railing against the communist vipers at Freedom House, leering into the camera a la Robert De Niro. He had simple answers for all the ills of his homeland. Teachers going to Botswana? Give them hope , right? Joey said he would put women in power to clean up the mess created by men perhaps not realising that most women do this anyway. And the philosophy according to Joey ? To see people get wealthy, yer know... and let them watch cable tv. Asked about his flying in and out of Guyana he reverted to the third person " Joey's up and down but he's here now. North Americans move around alot .It's no big deal." Spoken by a true patriot. Meanwhile over on Channel 11 Gail Teixeira was struggling to reconcile mini skirts with the teachings of Islam, on a programme called Insights organised by the CIOG. Teixeira revealed how during the sixties she loved to expose alot of skin which she preferred to cover up now. The host just nodded as she made excuses for semi-nudity, wild dancing and dub music. There's good dub music and bad, she proffered to the man whose religion bans even the playing of an innocent flute. "How do you move a society towards good ?" he asked, backed by a couple of thousand years of beheadings and chopped off hands. Copper-haired Gail looked up at the ceiling as if praying for the show to end. Back on Channel 6 a show called Rn B flava was really "happnin". What caught the attention was the word "flava". A check of the dictionary came up blank although there is Fava a type of awful tasting bean. What that has to do with R n B is anyone's guess. Caution! School children do not learn to spell from watching television or you can expect a life of hard manual labour. Anyway the host Mike obviously does not have a phone at home because all his friends called him up on the show. Viewers would be happy to know that although his girlfriend sprained her ankle dancing for Nitrageet she's OK. That's good to know. Mike likes to give away prizes for questions but he was woefully embarrassed when a regular winner complained how she had yet to get her prize from last week. Mike who was constantly licking his lips tried a fancy apology " Je suis tres... sorry. Even my french is going out the window !" Pardonnez moi, Mike. But he got full marks for telling some guy to "give your girlfriend a big kiss from me !" And then it was finally time for the new kid on the block "Straight Up " with Mark Benschop on Channel 18 . This night Benschop was modelling himself on Larry King with distracting grey suspenders and elbows firmly folded on the table. But he seemed somewhat subdued. After all he had tangled with the Attorney General only last week and it seemed like his impressive guest list had run dry. So he resorted to the open phone lines on "this beautiful night.. and kids be careful with your kites... let's just have a nice evening without slanging anybody" . It did not take long.... Apparently, Sharma afraid of this usurper to his throne had made some disparaging remarks about Benschop, calling him a "mental ill talk show host." Benschop had tried to get through on Sharma's lunch time show only to have his call shut off by the nimble fingered Sharma who slyly said there were " a praablem " with the phone. Despite Benschop's best efforts to talk about the real issues, call after call rolled in: " Sharma is a joke for the millennium...Sharma this Sharma that." All of this talk of the man coupled with the sharp feed back from viewers not turning down their TV's, worked Benschop into a grimacing rage. By the end of the hour he was in full cry; Sharma was a baby with a big toy... " he calls ME irresponsible! " " I know how to do my job , sitting down in front of a television....er camera ". The beautiful evening with kids flying kites had been blown away . Benschop in recommending " stiffer " penalties for sex offenders (surely not) looked directly into the camera. It was a cheery note on which to end the night. The nation could sleep peacefully, reassured that the future of local programming was in such capable hands.
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