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Frank, the new contestant, had just finished his audition, with little success. Frank's performance had been OK, but not much more. He left the stage and with him the slightest hope of achieving anything remotely close to a victory on the show. Watching him leave the stage, I was filled with a thought that he had been purposely sabotaged. But a few days ago I was present when they picked him and he didn't look like anybody's pet.
I was sitting in my place on the stage, which was occupied by the other judges. We were waiting for the next contestant to arrive. She was late for some reason.
Frank, the contestant, had been doing quite well during the previous rounds. He was always in the top four, and each time had been second between the two other contestants, and that was where he had left the final. It was only a matter of time before the judges' decisions would be announced. If he ends up in the bottom four as opposed to the top four, he would be eliminated from the contest, and his final appearance in front of the cameras would be over.
A minute had passed in complete silence, and I was waiting, with my colleagues, for the telltale of the contestants. The contestants always arrived in exact time. On two occasions, they were actually late, and some of the coaches suffered a calamitous loss, losing their chance for a victory, their livelihood, and their career in the doing. Other times, the contestants arrived strangely late, which caused even some of the coaches to go under the knife for painkillers.
Where was the girl? In general, the contestants had always been the next contestants to arrive in perfect time.
"I don't know what's happening," my colleague said with an exasperated voice. "Maybe they are all good friends, and they have decided to have a wonderful reunion without the cameras."
His comment caused a smile to creep across my face.
"Since this is another season of a singing contest, please tell me that we'll never have a season of a talk show."
"No," I said to him. "Despite the popularity of the singing competition programs, there are only a few of them that really get ratings.
"I remember that one of my first appearances as a stand-up comedian was on one of those shows where the contestants were interviewed by the judges. Of course the show had been a rip-off of a well-known show here in the US, where the interviewers asked the contestants questions about their lives, their hopes, dreams, and aspirations, and so on, and so forth. The contestants posed as stars, as somebody who deserved their fame and stardom. And their answers were always filtered through the prism of manipulation, of a narrative that would convince the viewers to vote for them.
"The same thing applied for most of those singing competitions, they were not as bad as the talk show. You know that in most of those TV shows about nature and animals, if a starving animal is living somewhere in an extremity of the earth, if its habitat were in danger of extinction, you could expect to see scores of humans flocking to help. The singing competitions were a wee bit different, and so were the contestants who participated in them. Their stories of poverty and hardship were carefully crafted; actually, they were crafted by the same people who crafted those talk shows. So pretty much, they were also all lies, and that was the case for many singing contests.
"The only advantage of a singing contest over a talk show was the story the contestants revealed on stage. Many of those talk shows were just a comparison of reputations of contestants before they were raised up to the occasion, like saying: 'What's happening on American Idol? These six contestants were asked to leave with peace and dignity, and the judges gave their reasons why.'"
"And what was the difference between these kinds of shows?" He asked.
"You would see Jim Carrey asking these contestants to come on stage: 'Okay, tell us about your life,' or somebody like that. The couples in those TVs shows about animals are also not as bad. In the wild, there is no equality. Men make more than the women and family members get more of the resources and food than the community. These same inequalities also apply in the TV shows where most families and couples live as if they are still in the middle ages, you know that most of the families live under the dictatorship of the oldest man in the family. Depressing, to say the least.
"At times, the oldest man in the family would kick all the girls to the street and decide who should be with who. And only at times do we see any fairness. There is a kind of equality in those TV shows where the contestants get food, money, and sometimes, a chance to see the outside world for a few days. Like in one of those reality TV shows, the old man let the girls choose who they thought was the best looking."
"What was on TV were a few dancing competitions and singing competitions, and most of them were badly scripted and manufactured, with a narrative that was nothing like the stories of the contestants. That was quite a difference. But the other similarity was that the judges, in most of the singing and dancing shows were stage actors. In those shows, all seemed to be what they think they were."