Chez Moi

First there was Blue Peter; then there was the GMTV fiasco; now there are rumours of X-Factor going down the same ‘match fixing’ route. All of this is making me wonder: is this the beginning of the end of Reality TV?

Earlier this year, the presenters of popular children’s programme Blue Peter went on air and shattered a few thousand kiddie hearts when they said they had “faked the winner of a phone-in competition.” Apparently, a technical glitch came up after a phone-in competition was announced and one of the production crew decided to save the day by having one of the girls who was visiting the BBC studios that day to ‘ring’ the programme. This girl pretended to be a caller from London and was then declared the winner.

When the whistle was blown on this operation, everyone right from BBC Children’s Controller to the presenters, apologised for this mess. But the deed was done.

But this was baby stuff compared to what happened over at ITV’s popular morning show, GMTV. From 2003 right until the time the deception came to light in 2007, the show had raked in £20 million or thereabouts, thanks to some fake phone-in contests.

A contestant for these phone-ins has to pay the premium rate, which could be around £1 per minute, with calls lasting upto 3 minutes or so. According to reports, around 62 million good people phoned in on the premium numbers, hoping to win some easy money. Add the figures and you get a rather neat sum. Of course, when the news broke, the presenters greeted the outraged Brit public with suitably apologetic faces and GMTV was fined a paltry £2 mil.

Now rumours have started circling that top dog of reality tv programmes, X-factor. The latest instalment is supposedly rigged. Or so ‘they’ say. Fans of the programme would remember that last year, contestant Ben Miller walked off in a huff (only to return a few winks later) amidst allegations of ‘fixing’. So what is different about this latest season’s offering? Apparently the rigging is being carried out on a much larger scale than ever. When some of the groups turned up for their audition wearing identical gold dresses, it raised more than a few eyebrows. Attendees of the boot camp are crying foul to the media that the finalists have been ear-marked already and it is all a giant charade. Sour grapes? Or the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Even Nigella seems to be faking it. Cognescenti has it that her show is a giant charade: the buses she takes for her shopping jaunts around London are all specially hired for the show, with the ‘passengers’ thrown in. The kitchen where she dishes her new recipes is not her ‘real’ kitchen, but a studio one, situated on an industrial estate in Battersea. Even the ‘friends’ for whom she cooks for are not her ‘real’ friends but ‘invited guests’, most of whom have never clapped their eyes on the culinary queen.

All of which boils down to, surprise surprise, is that reality tv ain’t no ‘real’ after all. Programmes that are supposedly shot ‘live’ turn out to be recorded ones (like BBC’s Saturday Kitchen) or have fake winners or worse. With all the rigging that seems to be going round, why are the public still falling for the whole charade? Personally, I’d rather watch a good pot-boiler or a gripping drama anyday, than a bunch of losers in a glass house, fart, burp, bitch and air their vacuous thoughts dall day long. So I say, it is time to get off the so-called reality television and get on with real lives.

Failing that, you could always live vicariously through Heroes.

As published in Desicritics.org

Was anyone shocked with the outcome of last night’s episode of The Apprentice? I was! I thought it would be an all-girl final like last year, between Kristina and Katie. Whilst I was hoping that Tre might get a look in, I never thought Scatterbrain Simon would make it. I most certainly did not even dream that Katie would get chosen for the final but would step down. With such a flimsy excuse too.

I mean, to say she cannot make the decision to move her family from Exeter to London without consulting her parents, who help look after her children smacks of something unprintable. Which parent takes up or goes for a job without thinking about things like childcare, schools etc? Conversely, which parent expects their child, shortlisted for the final, to check with them first before signing her life away? Give me a break!

Even before I went for my job interview (which, ironically, took place at Amstrad House - where the winning Apprentice would work!) I checked out the local daycare facilities for P and he had started the nursery three weeks before I joined my company, to give us both decent lead time to get used to the new state of things. And this ‘man-eater’, this ‘go getter’ who is in it to win it wants us all to believe that she cannot offer that sort of commitment? Who is she trying to kid?

The whole show smacked of something straight out of a cartoon. The interviews were all horribly edited. Poor Tre kept trying to assert the credibility of his organisation but the Western mind could not comprehend the meaning of a ‘family business’ in an Asian setting and the interviewer kept mocking him. When he gave his report to Sir Alan, claiming Tre was ‘running an international conglomerate from his bedroom’, I thought it was a cheap shot.

Likewise, the whole charade of Sir Alan giving Katie the benefit of the doubt and allowing her to go through, even though all of his advisers said there was something about her they don’t trust, only to come back to her and dig the reason why she wasn’t whooping with joy… the scenario just didn’t cut the mustard, unfortunately. I think some serious editing has happened for it to come across the way it did.

Whatever it was, the Apprentice is becoming more and more a reality game show, more along the lines of Big Brother, rather than a credible, grey cells worthy programme. Sound bytes are given prominence, in place of truth and I, for one, am fast losing interest. What’s more, I would not be the least bit surprised if Katie wound up in next year’s Celebrity Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! lineup.

S and I were watching this programme on the telly Wednesday night, just a moving background to the monotonous DIY work we were doing at that moment. The programme was called ‘How To Look Good Naked’ and involved a nervy, newish mum, not really comfy with her body shape and as such, not very confident. How the gay presenter got over her fears and ultimately, made her enough confident within herself that she sashayed down the catwalk in her pink matching bra and pants.

Now, as an Indian watching the show, there were many, many points during this that I gasped and squirmed. At the end of the programme, I was left with this question: how is parading semi-naked in front of millions a fitting test of confidence? I am not saying it takes immense guts to do so but why the hell is that even a requisite to ooze confidence? This is where the show left me flummoxed. Seemed to me, it was a drastic way to prove that someone is the epitome of confidence.

I had always thought that I was a fairly confident soul, capable of speaking my mind and generally able to get me from one day to another without greatly injuring myself. But no way on earth would I ever do any of that the woman did on the show last night. For starters, she had to see herself in the mirror, clad only in her undergarments (do you see a recurring theme here?) - why the heck would I do that on national TV? Confidence or not, is unnecessary. WHY would I parade my bloated, saggy self to the whole of Great Britain to choke over their dinner?

Before you go on the ‘Ohmigosh, she’s a prude’, let me stop you right there. I ain’t no prude but I firmly draw the line at going through the following things - shivering like a leaf in my undies, having a bloke (gay or not) poke and prod me in various places to show me what I’ve got, baring my ‘bedroom secrets’ to the whole world and its wife and to top it all, have the bloke helpfully slot some boob uplightment device inside my bra. No, no, no, N-O!

Forgive me for being so boring / naive, if I was suffering from some serious body issues post baby (who am I kidding? that’s a permanent state of mind where I am concerned!) I’d rather work on it by doing something - anything - else. Join the gym (which the woman did, after the bloke chose some hip track suits), sign up for some mummy-toddler club, get a personal shopper to help buy clothes that fit you, rope in your mates to give you some quality, non-mumsy time…. anything other than having to pose about in the buff. Drastic, methinks.

I went through some crippling bouts of depression, post-baby (and the MIL visit!) that wasn’t helped by the fact that I didn’t have any decent friend or family around me to prop me up. So I slowly confined myself to the four walls of our house, wearing some absolute eye-sores and generally feeling sorry for myself. Had I been home, surrounded by friends and family (which this woman no doubt was), I would have been dragged willy-nilly out into the Big Bad World and made to face it. I don’t know why this woman’s friends and family were standing around, wringing their hands, in a rather helpless fashion. What the hell was the hubby doing anyways? Why wasn’t he wooing the daylights of his wife till she felt sexy again?

If you think ranting about a bit of an undie show is a bit much, even for me, the best was yet to come. The once shaky now yummy mummy posed in the buff (’the shots will be extremely tasteful’) prior to walking down the ramp wearing nothing but her undergarments. And her mum and mate in the audience went ‘ooh! she is soo confident!’

Good grief!

I felt like banging my head at this point. We talk about women’s lib, suffragette and Girl Power and then say parading about half-naked on national telly epitomises confidence. Maybe I am a prude, after all. A prude tightly holding on to her clothes.

This unforgettable line was uttered by the memorable Quick-Gun Murugan. This was the name of a rather naff TV character, somewhat along the lines of the Wild West turns East-ish flavour and we used to see itty blurbs of his clips at random points during your movie or mega serial. He used to utter some majorly inane dialogues and cracked me up big time.
After many a year, I thought of him suddenly and had a yen to see some clips. In true-blue 21st C style, I You Tubed it and here are my results. Watch and enjoy!

‘Good morning ma’am, my name is Vandana Narayanan, could I please speak to Ms. so&so please…..’ If I had a penny for every time a Vandana or an Anil or a Kumar called me from a call centre, I would be a very rich woman. There is no escaping these call centres, they have got us covered. Morning, noon, night - they are there to rouse you out of bed, interrupt your tea, crash in on your family dinners, time after time. That was all they were to me, a nuisance.

Sue Turton has changed all that. On Thursday night’s episode of ‘Dispatches: The Data Theft Scandal’, she brought to the fore what we all fear deep down - some faceless person getting their grubby hands on our personal and financial data and using it to their own means. To find out more about this, Sue visits various places and people across the UK and in India. And what she finds out is fascinating - and more than a little scary.

Turton goes to India to try and find out how easy it is to get the confidential data we innocent people give over the phone on a regular basis, to these nameless strangers. To her own surprise, it turns out to be a not-too difficult task. Posing as a businesswoman who is interested in getting the financial details of UK customers, she soon makes contact with a Mr Arora. He turned out to be a fount of information, this Arora, as he shows her page after page of data ‘leads’, detailing a caller’s name, bank account number, bank sort code, credit card number, the CVV security number etc. Turton tries to disguise her shock by enquiring if this isn’t illegal but Arora flatly states ‘not at all’!

Then onto Calcutta, where enterprising Mr Chandak goes one step further and proves the authenticity of his ‘leads’ by playing the voice files of actual telephone conversation between his call centre agent and the unsuspecting caller. All this info for just £8!

In the UK, she talks to a convicted felon who tells how difficult it is to get the data from the call centres. Furthermore, he tells of the number of people who join these call centres with the aim of getting their hands on such data and making money out of them. While in the UK, one has to go via the underworld to get such info, in India, it seems much more easier to lay one’s hands on extremely confidential data.

There are brokers whose ‘job’ is to play the role of middlemen, between the call centres and the buyers, who pay tens of thousands to get hold of these ‘hot leads’. What’s even more shocking is the role played by the technicians, who come into such places to maintain the hardware and walk away with millions of data stored in the pen drives. ‘You wink and it is done’, boasts one such middle man.

Then there are these high-class brokers in Hyderabad, who charge upwards of $50 per lead - why? ‘Cos theirs is fresh and unused!

Sue Turton, over the course of a year, has managed to open a massive can of worms. The repercussions of this investigation will be manifold. Here in the UK, there’s going to be a great deal of panic amongst the public and this would undoubedly be fanned by the media and others disgruntled by the shifting of operations to countries like India and China. Indian government is also going to be under some pressure to put the foreign investors’ minds at rest and assure them of data protection. The great boom in the Indian economy owes a great deal to the call centres, BPOs and other associated industries - which could come down like a house of cards if these companies decide to up sticks and move out, en masse.

Will our government step-up? Will we see a marked decrease in call centre-related crimes? We’ll know soon! Until then, keep safe!