CCTV cancels a talk show and shifts its focus toward entertainment

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Cui Yongyuan and He Jing

CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, is in the process of retooling its programming to become more competitive with other national satellite channels. In the process, one-third of its shows will be canceled in the coming year.

One of those shows is Tell It Like It Is (实话实说), a panel-format talk show that encourages audience participation and “straight talk.”

The show was launched in 1996 with Cui Yongyuan (崔永元) as host. It quickly found an enthusiastic audience for whom Cui’s quirky personality was as interesting as the topics under discussion. After fourteen years on the air, the program is being canceled ostensibly due to declining ratings, and current host He Jing (和晶) is being blamed for failing to hold on to the substantial audience that Cui had built up.

But part of CCTV’s retooling is a shift away from serious discussion toward more lightweight entertainment. Tell It Like It Is currently airs on CCTV-1; in the future, CCTV’s flagship channel will become home to Wang Xiaoya’s Happy Game (开心辞典) and Li Yong’s Feichang 6+1 (非常6+1), both game shows, as well as the celebrity interview program Art Life (艺术人生), all of which currently air on CCTV-3.

Blogger and media critic Hecaitou commented on CCTV’s inexorable move toward puff programming, and on the difficulty of airing a program that seeks to tell the truth on a state TV station in an entertainment age:

Telling the truth about Tell It Like It Is

by Hecaitou

The curtain is about to fall on Hee-Hee-TV’s Tell It Like It Is after a life of 14 years. The official reason: poor ratings. In response, the host of Tell It Like It Is, He Jing, put up a blog post under the title “Don’t talk to me about ratings”, which said:

If you can answer the following questions you can see what’s really underneath the moronic excuse.

1. Can a single person give a thumbs up or thumbs down to a topic on Tell It Like It Is?

2. What media is there that can provide the ordinary masses with forty minutes of attention and discussion on a state TV screen?

3. The Internet permits anonymous, true speech. Can television allow someone to speak the truth anonymously?

4. For fully fourteen years, my team members on Tell It Like It Is have taken the subway to work and have relied on their families’ help to purchase a home. Are they idiots?

5. Is it a child’s fault if his own father does not want him, and his step-mother does not love him?

In translation, we find the following five impossibilities:

1. Autonomous control of program content is impossible;

2. Maintaining the present program format is impossible;

3. A format that allows the truth to be spoken is impossible;

4. A mechanism for equitable allocation of profit is impossible;

5. Finding a responsible supervisory department is utterly impossible.

My personal feeling is that the final point is the most important: everyone sees the program as a hot potato, with nothing to gain through its success and nothing to lose by its failure, so it is best to simply let it disappear. The world has one fewer television program, and one fewer problem. This was not a problem brought about by the program itself, but by speaking the truth.

If lies and pretense are the rule, then everything is fine and we can live out our days. But if there is even one bit of truth that emerges, then even the simplest truth will cause a chain reaction. People will accept the line, and then go on to ask: What about the rest? The biggest problem with Tell It Like It Is lies in the fact that it should not have made that beginning, nor should it have taken that for a title. But since it started things, then it has to continue without stopping or retreating. The audience is a company of unarmed supervisors on battlefield. Yet when you get down to it, can either Tell It Like It Is or Focus Interview actually expose truth to any significant degree? In other words, can they themselves handle so much truth?

What Cui Yongyuan started, He Jing has brought to a close. Cui did not realize at the time that the program would become so well-known — CCTV has so many programs. He Jing did not sense the way the wind was blowing, and thus a program that lucked into its position lucked out of it because its value was entirely different to different people. Yet the big picture is quite clear: CCTV is revamping this year, collecting all so-called “prime-time muscle” (黄金强档) onto CCTV-1, including Zhu Jun’s Art Life. Dissecting this trifling program reveals the strategy behind this.

Art Life is a packaged entertainment program that is neither art nor life. It is a televised version of Woman Friend magazine: the biggest draw for the audience is not to appreciate artistic quality or life stories, but to consume the tears of entertainers. If China permitted betting exchanges, then each episode would probably pull in several hundred million in speculations on the precise minute the entertainer’s tears would begin to flow. To pluck up its spirits in the face of new media’s weakening effect, the station ultimately chose to chase entertainment, because no one would watch otherwise. Axing a pure talk show like To Tell The Truth, one that is seriously deficient amusement-wise, is nothing is strange at all.

So either a program keeps on telling the truth until it is killed, or it throws itself headlong into the tide of entertainment. A face like Cui Yongyuan’s, which gives the impression of that he’s doubtful and teasing and thus sustains a program through misunderstanding, cannot be found anywhere else in China. Once Cui left, the only way forward was to have guests lash at each other on-stage, or scuffle and pull each others’ hair. Yet even raising a little bit of a ruckus is not really much of a problem. The program’s name could be changed to “Truth and Fighting” or “Defenders of the Truth,” with the slogan, “Truth and fighting are both naked.” The audience would be moved to tears by the thought of how, in their pursuit of the truth, the rascals don’t even care for their teeth. How laudable, how lamentable! Such a penetrating, well-intentioned program.

The state television station’s major embarrassment is that even with insufficient support from hard news content, it dresses up what it has, as if it’s popular with the audience. The only choice left is is to do entertainment, large quantities of soft content. Amusing the Chinese is simple: Stories magazine in the left hand, Woman Friend in the right, and the crowds will come. Tell It Like It Is was an experiment in this process, and for it to last fourteen years has been no easy task. It can retire secure in its successful performance.

To this observer, the audience, despite its years of effort, has not yet attained the right to crassness and vulgarity, but it has clearly won the right to pointlessness. At least there’s little harm in watching something pointless, and it can be a great way to pass the time.


According to the Beijing Times, starting from September 28, the following programs will no longer air on CCTV-1 (the station has not revealed whether they will turn up on other channels): Today’s Stories (今天故事汇), Story of Movies (电影传奇), Wellness Weekly (健康之路周刊), Half the Sky (半边天), Ethics Observer (道德观察), Approaching Science (走近科学), (正大综艺) , China Onstage (九州大戏台), Pinwheel (大风车), Samsung Knowledge Express (三星智力快车), and Us (我们).

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