Halloooo!
Really good to see you all in gay Paris, twas quite the wedding. Hope you all got back OK... Since nothing else happened this week that you're not already aware of, here is a placeholder post that I wrote earlier about Brazilian TV. Do what you will with it...
--
At this juncture I really feel that we have to discuss televised Sunday-afternoon entertainment in Brazil, and in particular the two perennial heavyweights of the genre: Domingão do Faustão, and Programa Silvio Santos.
Now, I realise UK and US television can be pretty vacuous, especially on Sundays when lowest-common-denominator ratings come into play. But whenever I end up watching either of the these two programs, I’m struck by a) how much they go above and beyond in terms of asinine pandering, and b) how much of them there is to go around. Both programmes basically make the up the entirety of Sunday programming on rival channels Rede Globo and SBT respectively, unless there’s a football match on to break things up.
Domingão is, horrifyingly, the one of the oldest and most popular programmes in Brazil, hosted since the late ‘80s by corpulent man-of-the-people Fausto Silva and consisting of a grab-bag of talent competitions, celebrity dance-offs, magic tricks/illusions and “You’ve Been Framed”-style home videos. The bleating studio audience all wear matching t-shirts, dancing girls move in packs to announce each ad break, and Silva, long past caring and possibly unaware of a world outside the TV studio, announces each new segment or product placement off tiny cue cards with the cold, dead eyes of a basking shark.
It’s a grim spectacle, but nothing compared to the utter hermetic weirdness of the
Programa Silvio Santos over on SBT. It’s a vehicle for Santos, a human facelift who basically built the channel from the ground up, to ramble away to an all-female audience in a tiny room, interspersed with game show contests, some kind of rampantly sexist beauty pageant and singing children, usually interviewed in hilariously passive-aggressive fashion by the host, whose hearing obviously isn't the best. He’s such an odd-looking guy – at this stage his face looks like a poorly-fitting mask of his face – that it’s actually fairly fascinating to watch, especially when things frequently go wrong, like in
this clip where he starts throwing money into the crowd on a whim, and gets his (again, really weird-looking) chin gouged in the fracas. Definitely the most compelling evidence I’ve seen so far for David Icke’s
“lizard people”theory.
And that’s without touching on the nation’s weird fixation with old Mexican comedy skits, which make up the bulk of SBT’s programming during the week, and have metastasized all over my Facebook feed in meme form; and the omnipresent Globo soap operas, which run every day BUT Sunday and are more than worthy of their own bemused blog post/rant at some point in the future.
I should point out that I do like some bits of Brazilian TV, like Globo’s satirical “Tá no Ar” which basically takes the piss out of its own network’s programmes,
à la “Not the Nine ‘o Clock News” (
this recurring bit, about a show which teases the contents of a mystery box for weeks on end, is a nice send-up of the
Domingão); and Masterchef Brazil, but only because of the incomparable
Erick Jaquin, who is just objectively amusing to watch doing anything.
--
And on that note, I'll leave you with my phrase of the day - "the cow went to the swamp" - which basically means "the shit hit the fan" with the added connotation of a bad situation getting worse; apparently in times of drought, cattle seek out water in faraway marshlands which makes the herder's job a lot harder and is just generally something to avoid. So now you know.
Ciao for now!
Fred
PS: I've put the wedding compilations online by popular request, give or take the odd omission (no Prince on Spotify, for a start):
Enjoy!
