My blessed life! How Happy it makes me!
I was recently asked by my good friend here in Portugal, Carl, if I’d like to join him in one of the TV studios in Lisbon, where Freemantle Media were shooting a Game Show!
Those who know me, know that I’ve been on the fringes of TV for many years, with the founding of PositiveTV in the early Noughties and now my herculean task of bringing a Qigong Documentary to life.
As a young man you couldn’t keep me off a stage, I acted and directed in three years of Tom Stoppard plays in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
There was never a question that I would say NO to Carl!
These days, my search for understanding has moved from Qigong to Consciousness.
There’s no doubt in my mind now that Zhineng Qigong is the most exquisite tool for a healthy body and mind. It’s ninety-five percent perfect.
It interests me to see that Dr Pang Ming has spent the past twenty years researching and writing about Consciousness and the Heart. I, inspired by him again, see this as the next obvious step for me too.
For the past five years, I have been reading and researching into this deep channel.
My prime discovery? – You can spend a lifetime reading about it, but if you don’t practice it, you’ll never experience it!
(That last sentence was really just a “Note to self!”)
You’ll know that many of my essays talk about, and turn over the nature of reality.
It is for this reason that I was so easily able to see clear through the veil of “Reality” when visiting the studios in Lisbon..
The Studio
It’s fascinating first to see just how many people there are in a Studio!
We sat down to lunch, I’d estimate the best part of one hundred souls.
My first instinct was to walk round the tables and ask each one “what is it you do here?”
Being just a humble Extra, of course I didn’t give this thought it’s head!
As you would expect, the Camera team must be 10 – 15 people, the sound team 5-10, with directors and producers, lighting men and special effects operators, and the guys who were handling all the requisite props..
There were many people for wardrobe; a sweet young lady ironed my shirt, better than it’s ever been ironed before, and in the blink of an eye!
People were handing out compliments like sweeties where-ever you went, “that shirt makes your eye colour really pop” – “that’s a really funny comment” – “Oh how interesting!”
It’s easy to see how nice it must be to actually be the Talent of the Show – to have obsequious people fawning over you all day, telling you how amazing you are, how funny you are, must be great for the Ego – day in day out, year in, year out… what does it do to your self-image?
Fake Tea-Time Thrills
Come tea-time, you’ll flip on the telly, and there will be three contestants slogging it out to prove who’s the quickest-witted, funniest or fastest on the buzzer!
The Host will provide funny stories, draw the best out of the Contestants, sympathise when their brains can’t quite grasp the right answer, and as the cash prize slips from their grasp.
This 22 minutes, plus adverts will pass by in a flash, leaving almost no memory or impact on you what-so-ever – it just helps pass the time…
The “reality” of its production is something different, you’d swear that they were filing a remake of War and Peace!
It’s a deadly serious affair.
I get it, they have One hundred people to pay, astonishingly complex sets to justify, writers who have dreamt up the game concept who need their royalties and a Host who can’t be cheap!
The average cost per episode is from One hundred thousand dollars, to Five hundred thousand dollars. (I was told that’s why they film anywhere but Hollywood these days, as the “rates have become crazy”…As If I didn’t think they were already crazy!)
The mechanics of the game are of course all pre-planned, the show is scripted, and there are little segments for the host to “banter” with the contestants.
Even that’s scripted – there was a sweet pair of “Audience Wranglers” who had hand-picked the contestants, drawn a handful of interesting or juicy stories from them, and fed these to the host.
The Contestants had been filed into categories of Funny, Silly, Brainiacs etc…(Of course, to get an interesting spread for each episode.)
Everybody had to have a story on hand to answer to the inevitable question “what will you do with the money if you win!?”
My friend Carl invented a story that he was off to Turkey to get new teeth and hair implants, which provided great fodder for the host to crack gags, eventually the story morphed into a fictional Hip Operation too!
(We were Stand-in contestants rather than the real things. The real audience was turning up the next day, after our run-through. It was apparently still cheaper to fly in 32 hand-picked Contestants from America – who also become the audience for the other shows – than to film in the US!)
They were using the same set to film for other countries.
Perhaps they will have a version for Portugal, as the set is here already, but they were also filming for Australia and who knows where else…
One of my co-Extras told me the interesting difference he’s experienced between the shoot for the Australians, and the shoot for the Americans.
It was blindingly obvious to me, somebody who’d really only seen UK quiz shows that seem relatively calm and sensible, and apparently the Aussie version was the same.
The day we experienced was very different.
I have never been asked, or wanted to Whoop and Holler in the way I did, for such an extended period.
Do our friends in the USA really have such dull lives that they need this level of excitement injecting into it?
Perhaps it’s the fact that they have so little holiday during their drab working lives, that they have to have fake fun injected into it every tea time?
Maybe it’s just another layer of the Great American Dream Lie, like jogging along children, when you’ve ill-advisedly taken them to an art gallery, in the hope that they will be interested, but they are not…“Are we having fun yet!?”
Are you having fun yet?
Like the allegory of Plato’s Cave, we stood on the stage, in an area surrounded by lights and cameras. Occasionally a voice would boom out STOP, or TAKE A BREAK – this god guided us mortals round the stage, but we never did find out who he was.
We were just today’s pawns in his current game.
We were instructed “when you see the Deity arrive from his dressing room, put down your phone and start clapping like a demented seal” and “He’s really funny – laugh at his jokes…”
To be honest – you want to feed me, pay me, I’ll clap and laugh all day long.
I’ll put on the “Jeremy” show for anybody bearing cash or food!
The veil between TV land and “the Real World” is notable
Everything is premeditated and sorted out in the edit in TV world, all the sadness and upset, all the stress and worries brushed under the carpet.
Nobody wants to see you sob, as the money you needed for you hip operation slips through your fingers… Get another contestant please – this one is faulty – didn’t you explain how we expected him to behave, come on, put on a brave face!
Albert Camus
I’m reading Albert Camus again.
It strikes me that when many of his fellow writers and philosophers were taking a Nihilistic approach to life – it’s so terrible, what’s the point of actually trying…
Albert takes a very different view…
He seems to agree that life is pointless and cruel, but that being the case, we might as well try to enjoy it as much as we possibly can.
I’m with him.
My trip to the studio has reminded me that fame is a terrifying master, that TV is a twisted world of fake nonsense, and that people will do almost anything for money.
These games we play seem so incredibly important.
It’s so incredibly important to find a way to fill another half-hour of somebody’s meaningless life with more meaningless information.
But some people do actually Wake UP from it all.
When you finally break your chains, and get a chance to turn round and see who it is who’s making the shadows on the cave wall that you’ve been obsessed with these past years, then be sure to give me a shout!
I’m always happy to help smash the illusion!
I’ve spent the last five years poking sharp sticks through the veil, and trying to figure who it was behind the curtain…
(It was me all along it would seem!)
If you do nothing else today, stop for a moment, tune into your heart, ask yourself “What is it that will REALLY make me feel happy” – and then follow that path without compromise!
Make yourself Happy! (Make yourself sad also if you wish… but happy energy is much stronger)
Let’s have fun people!
Hao La! (Means “Everything is good already” in Chinese…)
