Game-u Show-oo! YOSH!

When I’m not having nightmares, I’m having bizarre afternoons.

Yesterday I helped out my friend Amelia with what’s called a “Promo”, short for promotion. This particular promo was kind of pseudo commercial meant for networks and advertisers for a game show called “Chain Reaction.” It’s a sort of a low-budget affair that relies on groups of people running around with cheap cameras. I was one of those people.

The premise of the show works like this: You have two hosts, in this case, some Korean-American named Christian and a local girl named Claudine. They were the usual sort, very pretty to look at, nice teeth, sociable and all that. Christian was the “hoster” and Claudine was the “runner”. I’ll explain in a second.

First the they had to locate two people who would act as “Team Captains.” What this consisted of was just running around the street, in this case, East Coast Park on a Saturday morning, asking people, “Hey, you wanna kill a few hours and be on a game show?” If they agreed, then there would be a sort of “coin toss” question. Whoever answered it first and correctly would get to make the first move.

Now here’s where the actual show begins. Christian went up to a vantage point. We found a garden/dining rooftop area on one of the restaurants on the restaurant strip that looked out on the beach. With the two team captains, Christian then presented them with a series of questions. The captain would pick one question, and then would have to look out onto the vista of the beach at all the people rollerblading, dogwalking or singing “Kumbaya” with their fellow Christians on the guitar, and pick someone that looked like they might know the answer to the question. That’s the basis of the show, first impressions. Once the team captain had someone they thought was capable of answering the question (Example, a beer question. Hey, maybe that guy sitting at the table with a huge pitcher of beer might know the answer…) Claudine, who had a radio mike linked to Christian at the roof, had to follow his directions and go run over to the person selected and ask them if they wanted to play. If they said “No,” the chain was “broken” and the question was turned over to the opposing captain who also had to pick someone. If they wanted to play but got the wrong answer, the “chain” was broken again, and same principle applied. If the selected person got it right, then they formed a new link in the “chain” and had to go up to the vantage point to join the team captain who’d correctly picked them. This went on until a chain of five people had been formed, at which point the host asked each individual a question, and they ALL had to get the right answer in order for them to win the $5000 which would be split five ways for $1000 each.

Nice, in theory.

In reality here’s what happened.

First, it was a promo, so there was no prize money. Second, this is Singapore, so they aren’t exactly the most extroverted people in the world. This is an island where people at a “Blur” concert politely clap and remain in their seats, and where people on the street see a camera and go out of their way to avoid it. They do NOT like public appearances here, let alone acting up. Third, this is Singapore, so unfortunately it always seems like the women are the informed, educated ones, and the guys are just silly dorks that constantly say “Ah?” whenever meager brains can’t process the incoming information, which is 9 out of 10 times generally.

Are you smelling the doom yet?

Anyway, after meeting at McDonald’s for breakfast and a recap of who was doing what, we were off. I was thrown my little Digital Video cam (It’s a Sony!) and was assigned to Claudine, the runner, who or more or less had to endure my droll, off-the-cuff observations of the people, landscape and her hair.

Things fell apart shortly after that.

We did manage to locate team captains. We wanted a girl and a guy. We found a shy local girl named “Valentine,” and couldn’t find any local guys at all that could speak, let alone knew what the hell we were saying to them, so in the end, opted for white bread again, and found some Brit with a cute Asian girlfriend named Heather, whom Christian immediately started hitting on, even though she wasn’t a part of the show. Amelia was already starting to feel the pressure, but then she knew the pressure that was coming. Trying to get a Singaporean to appear on TV and be lively and spontaneous is kind of like trying to get the Pope out for a night of nacho and bowling. It didn’t help that most of the so-called easy questions were difficult for most people to answer.

So once the team captains were selected, we went for our first completely random and spontaneously chosen link in the chain, who, due to lack of anyone at the time having the guts to appear on camera, turned out to be the British sister of one of the other camera men, who had tagged along just to see some of the fun.

She randomly plucked herself down on a bench that was conveniently easy to see from the rooftop, and then she was randomly selected by the team captains, after said captains were told, “Pick her.”

Then Claudine and I randomly ran over to her, with Amelia as the unobtrusive “friend who just happened to be there” at the bench, and Claudine asked her the question, which our pre-planted, pre-briefed, randomly selected contestant spectacularly failed to answer. (It was, “Name the author of the Harry Potter books”) and Amelia was trying to whisper without her lips moving, “J.K. Rowling. J.K. Rowling…” and accidently ended up answering the question, so we had to inform our random contestant of what the answer was, coach her on how to spontaneously search the tip of her tongue for the answer, then go for completely random take two.

It went on like this for most of the morning. Amelia was a real pro. She ran around in happy-go-lucky desperation trying–and usually failing–to find people willing to play. One guy even went so far as to say ‘It’s my Saturday, leave me alone,” without even breaking stride when Amelia came up to him, which was totally amazing to me, because Amelia is really cute, and most guys give her the time of day without her asking for it. On my side, I had a very typical Singaporean encounter when I was hanging with Claudine, smoking a cigarette while Amelia looked for more random contestants to brief beforehand. Some kid on bike came up to us, seeing the crews with the cameras and boom mikes and said “What TV show is this?”

Claudine said, “It’s a game show. Wanna’ play?”

In true Singaporean fashion his eyebrows narrowed, probably imagining the money involved and he asked, “How much do I get if I play?”

I could not help rolling my eyes at this.

Claudine explained that it was promo sort of thing, and that for now, he’d get a voucher for a DVD or CD at HMV, and when the kid realized that no money was forthcoming, said something like, “Uh… I’m seventeen, I don’t think I can appear in this without parental consent,” and then promptly biked off to the periphery of the shooting activities to watch and try to appear in the background waving at people.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice…

Amelia found more people to feed answers to, nearly all of whom were girls. The guys were just hopelessly shy, or maybe just plain hopeless. One point, we thought we’d a really bright and energetic pair of guys who looked really interesting with their somewhat punkish hairstyles and gleeful smiles and Amelia proceeded to interrogate them.

“Hey, do you want to appear in a game show?”

“Yes!”

“Great! We need your friend to say no, and you to say ‘yes,” can you do that?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, could you just stand over there?”

“Yes!” He didn’t do it and continued to smile.

“Okay, just move over there, right?”

“Yes!” Same reaction.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes!”

“Do you not speak English?”

“Yes!”

“Where are you from?”

“Yes!”

At this point a whole bunch of similarly cool friends showed up, and they all started chattering amongst themselves. In Japanese.

“You’re Japanese?!?”

“Yes!”

“You don’t speak English, do you?”

“Yes!”

Amelia looks at me with a helpless, “This is so fucked!” sort of smile on her face.

Some guy that DOES speak English shows up and explains that this is a tour group of Japanese students who is going back to Tokyo tomorrow. Amelia explains the situation to him, he translates, and the whole group starts saying, “GAME-U SHOW-OO! GAME-U SHOW-OO! HAI! HAI, HAI, HAI!”

The translator explains that they ALL want to play.

I’m cracking up at this point.

Amelia comes up with a plan, since we haven’t had people refuse to play on camera yet, so she tells him to tell them that they need to say “No.” He translate and they start saying, “No! Hai! No!”

Amelia plants them all over by a tree and tries to get them to sit down naturally. They’re all saying “Sit-u! Sit-u!” and not doing it. Amelia gets down on her haunches. They imitate. She tells them to sit in a circle. They start saying “Sit-u circle-u!” and get in a perfect, not very natural looking circle, all on their haunches. I decide to not help matters any by shouting out Japanese words I picked up from anime, like “Yosh!”

“YOSH! YOSH, YOSH, YOSH! HAI!” they reply.

“Mobile Suit Gundam-u!’

“Ah! Gundam! HAI!”

“Akira!”

“HAI!”

“Tetsuuuuuo! Kaneeeeeeda!”

“HAI!”

Amelia is just about ready to kill them and me. She grabs Claudine and tells her to go over and ask them if they want to play. Claudine rushes up to them and says, “Hey, do any of you want to play a game?”

“YES, YES, YES!”

Now Amelia is going to cry.

After more translating, the students finally get it and start dropping all these “Sumimasen!”s and Claudine trys again. This time they’re all smiling, waving their arms in denial and saying “NO, NO, NO!” while laughing all the while.

Later on Amerlia has completely given up on any male that looks Asian and is sticking with the white boys. Things are getting desperate. Every person willing to play who has been able to answer is an educated Chinese girl, the men are all hopeless. Christian the other host has now switched from hitting on Heather the girlfriend of the other team captain (Who has been eliminated by this point anyway) to Mary, some Chinese Baywatch girl in bikini, white shorts and rollerblades, who was picked as a contestant. Amelia finds another white guy, really enthusiastic, seems to be Dutch or something, he can’t speak English to save his life, or at the very least, seems to process English in some obscure Dutch fashion that requires him to repeat the question, then go off on some existential tanget about despair and suicide with a smile on his face. Whatever.

Some other white guy goes biking towards us.

Amelia literally throws herself in front of the bike, arms held up, and screams “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?!?”

“Uh… yes.”

“HELP ME OUT WITH THIS GAME, GODDAMMIT…”

“Ooookay…”

So we get all the people up there, the chain has been formed. Christian is going into OTT American Gameshow Host mode and is probably scaring some of the girls with his seemingly cocaine-inspired antics. All of the contestants have been briefed and the answers fed ahead of time. We get our carefully planned, completely scripted, totally spontaneous and improvised reaction shot of all our happy winners. Amelia is just about ready to sleep for a week.

Later on, we’re back at my place, having coffee, we’re both relating the day to my girlfriend, and all I can think over and over again is the same thought that’s been bugging me for the last few years in this biz.

Anyone who says TV is glamorous don’t work in it.

Game-u Show-oo! YOSH!