Showing posts with label Reality TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reality TV. Show all posts

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Tactical Voting in Australian Masterchef


[Aussie Masterchef Finalists Poh, Chris & Julie]


Forget the Witi Ihimaera and Hone Harawira scandals, I have a far more weighty accusation to share with the New Zealand public. Yes, patient readers, I believe that our favourite reality show of the moment, Australian Masterchef, is rigged!

I first became aware of the gravity of the situation after almost coming to blows with a Julie-partisan (my mother) over dinner at my parent's house last night. I, a Chris true-believer, have elected to boycott the grand finale tomorrow in protest at the blatantly unfair judging that saw him packed off into beery oblivion ... Snout to Tail, Stout to Ale indeed!

Storm in a teacup (or a crockpot) you say? Too trivial for a weighty intellectual blogsite such as this? I don't think so.

What do we expect of a good reality show? Well, logical, consistent rules, for a start. Australian Masterchef got off to a shaky start by importing a system of voting-off-the-island from Survivor which seems to me completely unsuited to a skills-based programme such as this. Who cares who the other contestants want to get rid of? The point is who has the ability to go further. For the judges to step back from elimination decisions such as this as about as fatuous an arrangement as I can well imagine.

But, then, is it a skills-based programme? The first few "master-classes", where head judges Gary and George stroked their own egos by giving lessons in how to butter bread or how to boil water, left even the contestants baffled and unsure how to react. Was this some colossal piss-take? One could see them alternately scratching their heads and yawning until they learnt the correct response: fawning adulation. Julie was an early winner in this regard, along with the egregious, Uriah-Heep-like Sam.

[A Rogues Gallery: Masterchef judges
Gary Mehigan, Sarah Wilson, George Calombaris & Matt Preston]


As the seemingly interminable months of the competition wound on, chef after chef came up for elimination opposite the talentless Sam and self-doubting Julie only to receive their marching orders. It couldn't be ... that they were simply better TV than their opponents, could it? That would be a bit harsh. Let's just attribute it to their being more adroit and abject flatterers.

By the time of the Hong Kong challenge, even the judges seem to have woken up to the fact that they were looking at a final with all the good cooks (except Chris) already sent home. So what was their solution? Reverse the last set of eliminations and bring three failed contestants back. Brilliant! It meant that the entire Hong Kong excursion was a complete waste of time which accounted for no contestants, despite a whole week of stuffing around there. Fun and games, yes, but one could see that for Chris at least this was the final straw.

He'd put up with the transparently self-serving, insultingly elementary "master-classes;" had attempted to endure the transparent politicking of the so-called "kiddie mafia" (Sam, Josh & Kate); but he seems somehow to have retained a simple faith in the basic concept of a reality show, which is that you can actually send people home and hope they'll stay there.

By now the rules were so complex, so contradictory, so obviously invented on the fly, that the whole contest had come down to one question. Who's the most obvious candidate for "little Aussie battler" among those still left standing? The talented (though already-eliminated) Poh was just a bit too swollen-headed for the role. And just imagine the fuss from heartland Australia if an Asian won their inaugural "Masterchef" award! Chris might have seemed a good fit if it weren't for his refusal to blub and emote and self-destruct all over the screen. Who was left? Julie.

Last night Julie served up a leg of lamb, a piece of stuffed chicken and a dry piece of chocolate cake. She failed to garnish them with any of the sauce or vegetables she'd prepared to go with them through sheer incompetence and flap. Our guest judge, cook-book guru (and disastrous fashion-victim) Donna Hay, helpfully explained that this "didn't matter with rustic cooking." By this stage it was clear that three courses of vegemite sandwiches "cooked with love" (Julie's big theme) would have got her through with flying colours. 'Nuff said, as Stan Lee used to say.

I don't need to watch any further. I know Julie is going to win the competition overall. I don't believe she deserves to. She's about as much of a master-chef as my arse. For the love of Mike, didn't you guys want to find out who was the best cook among them? No you didn't is the brutal answer. You wanted to elicit a lot of sentimental tear-jerking slop from the contestants in order to build up your ratings. J'accuse. That's all I can say at this point: J'accuse.

You've robbed me of my simple faith in reality TV. No longer will I be able to sit glued night after night to the cook-offs and taste-tests. I mean, I expect this sort of thing of Americans: Las Vegas bookies conspiring in smoke-filled rooms, Martha Stewart and her pet brokers trading in dodgy stocks, but I wouldn't have believed it of our bluff, hearty neighbours to the North. You're your own worst enemies, that's the truth of it. You'll end up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs (or perhaps, in this case, the goose that fricassees them in boarfat) ... Shakespeare, as usual, said it best:

O now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue! O farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th' immortal Jove's dread clamors counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone
...

(Othello 3.3.347-357).


Never mind, Chris, we still believe in you (though you won't catch me eating any pig's heads or pig's trotters outside a nightmare ...)

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Taxidermy


"Martha's really into taxidermy."

So said the man showing the successful Apprentice contestants around one of Martha Stewart's weirder country houses on TV2 last night. This was their reward for selling more garden hoses than the other team had sold portable air pumps.

"Martha's the biggest animal-lover you can imagine," he continued to gush as he ushered them past a succession of immense stuffed fishes plastered all over every available wall. She loves 'em, all right -- especially stuffed.

The colours of the whole house were based on this fish motif, apparently, because Martha's "really into monochrome design" -- she likes painted ceilings; she got the colour for the wall from an old faded print (it looked a bit like it, too) ... and so on and so on and so on.

The progressive deification of celebrities has reached frightening levels on this spin-off of Donald Trump's presumably deliberately absurdist The Apprentice. One begins, finally, to get some inkling of what the Romans felt inside while worshipping their emperor as a living god.

Marcela gushed on and on for minutes about what it meant to her when Martha deigned to lean over and sample a bit of her sugar bun at another reward ceremony (breakfast at another of Martha's ghastly vulgar over-designed pads). "It was so intimate," she explained, "sharing a moment like that." Martha Stewart taking a piece from one of the very pastries she herself had (allegedly) baked ...

The funny thing, of course, is that the programme completely tanked in the USA. Martha was seen as wimpy and insufficiently decisive, and Trump had to tick her off for damaging his franchise.

One can see why it failed -- all the mad antics of the various performers fail to explain why any of them would want to work for Martha. Her "business strategies," as outlined in a series of excruciatingly banal inserts, consist of revelations along the lines of "Buy low, sell high." Last night she solemnly informed us that doing a good sales pitch involved trying to make your words reach your audience in order to promote the product you wish to sell.

What's next? "Speaking is when you open your mouth and words come out of it ... if you choose the correct words, then people sometimes understand what you say. On the other hand ..." Perhaps that's a little too philosophical for Martha.

The whole jailbird thing is adroitly mixed into the combination trainwreck / history lesson that is Martha Stewart: The Apprentice. Roundly rebuking a "quitter," Chuck, on an early episode, she declared: "I've never quit anything in my life. I even went to jail, for God's sake ..."

Funny, she almost sounded like Gandhi there for a minute. He went to jail to fight for the independence of his country; Martin Luther King went there to agitate for civil rights -- but Martha went to jail for a far higher cause, her own sacred right to party. Why shouldn't she play the market, do a little insider trading? They were her stocks, after all ...

The bitching and moaning in the loft has reached the usual poisonous levels familiar from earlier incarnations of this programme (in its various Trump avatars), but once notices that Martha's wisdom and mana remain beyond criticism. To question that would be indeed to sin against the holy ghost.

Martha's poor long-suffering daughter, who sits there week after week biting her tongue and looking as if she might have a thing or two to report about her mother if only she were given free access to a camera (and had a fully-fuelled jet ready to whisk her off somewhere beyond the reach of the Martha Stewart goon-squad immediately afterwards), is the final bizarre ingredient in the mix.

It's a stuffed program. We all knew that going in. What's refreshing and wholesome about the Martha Stewart "reality" show is that it actually failed. Apparently there's a moment when people have had enough of toadying and grovelling to this repulsive saccharine-scented bully. Maybe quite a few of us actually do notice the difference between Paris Hilton and a singer (or a celebrity, for that matter).

I agree it's not a lot of hope to hold out, but it's something, at least.