From ‘Prank that got The Married Men in trouble involves mention of child abuse and molest’, 18 Jan 2013, article by Maria Almenoar.
The radio segment which led to the termination of The Married Men’s contract with HotFM 91.3 involved a telephone prank on a woman who was apparently going to take up an early childhood course. On Thursday, deejay Andre Hoeden called the woman claiming to be an officer from an embassy who was doing a background check on her.
He asked if she hit children, to which she said no. Mr Hoeden then advised her to only hit children from poor families as they would not have the money or time to come after her with lawyers, unlike “expat children” from “very rich” families who could afford lawyers.
The call, which was part of the morning show’s “Kena Pluck” humour segment where people are tricked, also involved Mr Hoeden telling her that hugging children was considered molestation in some countries. He then asked if she had ever hit on any of her pupil’s fathers.
Hot FM91.3 said on Friday it terminated the services of The Married Men with immediate effect, citing a breach of the terms of its contract.
Barely a month ago, the Married men team were interviewed regarding their reaction to the nurse who killed herself over the Royal couple prank. They acknowledged that Kena Pluck had ‘limits’ and screened their prank requests carefully, rejecting anything to do with ‘death, disease, race, religion and national security’. In a follow up ST article on 19 Jan 2013, it was revealed that a listener had called in to complain about the prank. There was also mention of how the victim could do ‘favours’ for two officers to get visa approval more quickly, which suggests that the target was a foreign worker. If the station had been more discerning in light of the Royal couple suicide, and also consider how quickly our authorities crack down on defamatory material of late (especially anything related to corruption), perhaps Rod Monteiro and gang would have been spared this harsh twist of fate. They aren’t the first to be fired over inappropriate jokes though; Sheikh Hailkel was sacked from 98.7 FM following complaints for talking about ‘white panties’.
Unlike the random innocent bystander in most prank calls, Kena Pluck, or should I say ‘Kena SABO’, marked specific targets requested by listeners, who would fill the DJs in with the relevant background checks to make the caller as deviously believable as possible. Now why would anyone put their loved ones through such unnecessary evil for the sake of a couple of minutes of rib-tickling Schadenfreude? Kena Pluck appears to be more of a petty revenge platform for callers to get back at ex-bosses, ex-lovers or a bad service provider. It’s one thing to be embarrassed, another to be freaked out, bullied AND embarrassed on national radio. At the end of each segment, the Married Men would let the victim in on the joke, though anyone in that position would be obliged to play along and laugh it off even though they may secretly be cursing the station for wasting their time. I mean, at least give the poor fellow a cash prize for being a sport or something.
Army gags seem to be a favourite of the Married Men. In 2009, Andre Hoedon commanded a boy to perform push ups over the phone. You actually feel sorry for the little squirt, even as you snigger at ‘Sgt Rajah’s’ antics.
If you’re an old man with a heart condition, you better pray your son doesn’t ‘pluck’ you out of nowhere by landing himself in ‘jail’.
Not all gags go smoothly though. In this jealous husband prank, you actually WORRY for the Married Men’s lives. Instead of funny, this is rather uncomfortable to listen to, with the DJs betraying a hint of nervous laughter rather than the usual maniacal version. Eerily, the victim threatened the DJs about ‘keeping their jobs’. Thanks a lot, wife, for not telling the DJs your husband’s a PSYCHO who forgot to take his daily medication.
In 1994, Class 95 FM reportedly pulled one where a producer posed as a head nurse to inform a new father that he had been given the WRONG BABY (Wrong baby prank on radio show draws listeners’ complaints, 11 May 1994, ST). Not so classy, or funny – especially if you pose as a nurse from KK Hospital.
Phone pranks are notoriously hit-or-miss, and you can’t have a hit without being somewhat MEAN or politically incorrect. They should also be kept short and sweet to end the recipient’s misery early in order to avoid any backlash of emotional distress. The longer the prankster carries on with it, the deeper he gets engrossed into the role, when he gets carried away with the manipulation of his victim and takes things over the edge, which is what could have happened in this case. Or they could have just messed with the wrong person with the wrong theme at the wrong time. Tough luck to the Married Men, especially Rod Monteiro who suffered an acute stroke in early 2012. I wonder if the unnamed ‘saboteur’ who started all this rubbing his hands in malicious glee, is now holding his head with those same hands in guilt and shame.
From ‘He made fun of my name’, 26 Oct 2012, article by Foo Jie Ying, TNP
A dispute between neighbours over renovation noise led to one of them making a police report against the other, claiming that the latter had made fun of his name. In the report made on Oct 16, he said: “By making fun and changing my family surname, he is insulting and degrading the Indian culture.”
In an interview with The New Paper On Tuesday evening, Mr Sivalingam Narayanasamy, 55, said: “What he has done is to change my surname.” The other party in the dispute is former radio deejay Daniel Ong, 36, who is now known as a celebrity cupcake-shop owner with his wife, Miss Singapore-Universe 2001 Jaime Teo.
Mr Sivalingam showed TNP a letter purportedly written by Mr Ong to him, in which Mr Ong allegedly made fun of his name. In the letter, Mr Ong referred to Mr Sivalingam as “Sivalin-ganamstyle” and added, “That’s my new nickname for you… cool, huh?”
Mr Ong addressed this on his Facebook page, saying: “He claims I insulted him coz I addressed him as Sivalingam num-style in my last letter… but I told him that I didn’t mean that and it’s the coolest thing around now.”
If you read the contents of Daniel Ong’s letter for yourself, you’ll find it full of sarcastic insults, spite, fake LOLS and general meanness. From the way how this neighbourly spat has been overblown, it’s obvious that Sivalingam’s racist accusation is a pretext for filing against Ong’s nastiness and intolerance over a baby-tormenting and ‘old-lady murdering’ renovation project. As with his grudge against SPH, the ex-DJ has made his Facebook page his personal diary and broadcaster now that he’s gone from radio. Regardless of who’s at fault here, this is really an exaggerated episode of neighbours thrashing it out over one ugly incident after another, culminating in a sensational turf war with a typical but ultimately futile standoff involving the police. I wonder what will become of these two once it’s Christmas.
It’s like two boys fighting in the playground and one threatening with his daddy because the other called him names and he had no comeback. The natural tendency in such testosterone-charged scuffles is for the one picked on to retort with a creative insult of his own, until both get tired of this one-upping nonsense and walk away. At least these two grown ups are civil enough not to bring their Mamas into it or roll around in the mud throwing punches. Conflicts of this sort are inevitable, no matter how we try to inculcate a ‘give and take’ culture, when in fact we’re mostly looking after our own interests and ‘community’ means running into that comfort zone and pacifier called Facebook where your ‘friends’ are obliged to support you all the way even if you’re acting like a child who just got his rattle nicked by a bully.
When it comes to a war of words, it’s unlikely that Sivalingam would get the upper hand over a cupcake king with the gift of the gab (Daniel even refers to himself as ‘FUNNY GUY” on his Twitter page), hence to counter his weakness in petty insult-trading, the big guns have to be summoned on a hot-potato issue (racism) just to show that he means business. I’m not even sure if this guy knows what Gangnam Style is, which may explain why he would consider the name-mashing a childish insult, maybe the equivalent of the Chinese ‘Tan Ah Kow’. He does cut an imposing figure however, like a superintendent in the force, or someone who runs a butchery franchise and boxes hunks of meat in his spare time. Daniel Ong (who once played ‘Mr Kiasee’ in the Mr Kiasu sitcom) will get his cupcakes SQUASHED if put in a ring with this bull of a man.
Don’t call him Gangnam
What’s worrying, and yet strangely assuring at the same time, is why our police EVEN BOTHER with such things (Assuring because it means our cops have nothing much to do). Well I suppose if they’re forced to investigate teachers who cut the hair of students without permission, this fight between an angry celebrity and his angry neighbour must seem as exciting as taking down rival triads in comparison. Gangs of Mei Hwan Drive perhaps. Still, this is what happens if you have public endorsement of the over-the-top censuring of anything mocking a minority race. You give people excuses to point fingers at the one thing that will get your enemies in trouble, when you’re really pissed off with them because they embarrassed you, not because they humiliated your race, your family, your ancestry and your gods.
Siva claims discrimination when Daniel Ong mashes up his surname with Gangnam style, while the latter explains the pun away as a reference to his ‘threatening’ stance with arms akimbo. Neither argument makes sense. I can’t imagine an aggressor doing this in a mano-a-mano confrontation, unless he’s trying to subdue you with laughter.
Please don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything
I suspect it’s harmless wordplay more than anything else, though these days dropping sly racial references is like tossing firecrackers on a minefield. Siva doesn’t have a case because Gangnam itself has already taken Indians by storm, and just about anyone with an Internet connection and doesn’t understand a single word of Korean.
From ‘Illicit affair off air’, 26 August 2012, article by Akshita Nanda, Sunday Times Lifestyle
…In Memoirs Of A DJ, published by Marshall Cavendish, Lopez reveals that Richmond had wanted to call the wedding off days before the ceremony, and she had refused, fearing public embarrassment. She wrote in the book: “Because little 26-year-old me was worried about the public fallout. What would they say? How could I possibly walk around after that? How would I ever buy nasi lemak in a food court again?”
According to her, she could not see or did not want to admit that there was no connection with Richmond, that they were two kids who were merely playing masak masak. Their relationship dissolved not long after the honeymoon and the book described how she became suspicious of his relationship with another woman, identified only as B in the book,and found an illicit love note in his car when Richmond was away filming.
The note was filled with sweet nothings that only an intimate partner would say, she recalled in the book, including the words “…I can still smell you on my pillow…”
…She later followed Richmond secretly and saw him on a date with the other woman. Even then, she could not make herself ask for a clean break. Instead, she cried in solitude or in front of her make-up assistants.
…Lopez stresses that her autobiography is not intended to lash out at her former husband, even though she is aware that many readers will flip immediately to the pages about her first marriage.
“It’s definitely not revenge. It’s just what happened. If I’m going to do my memoirs, it would be silly not to mention it…..People know who I am, but they don’t really know about my personal life. I thought, let people get to know me a little bit more and let them see if they’ve known me at all.” She says she was initially hesitant to write about her first marriage and its breakdown, but then decided “people are expecting to read it. If you’re going to write about your life, write about your life.”
“My mistake throughout that time was to keep it to myself, I was totally isolated,” she adds, as her sister silently takes her hand.
“But I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. I’m not about to take a dagger and stab it in someone’s back and destroy a family. All I’m saying is, this is what I went through.
“At the end of the day, I’m very happy for him, he has a wife and a kid and his career’s doing okay.“
The only other Singaporean public figure I could think of to write ‘MEMOIRS’ is Lee Kuan Yew. Despite being a veteran in the media business, you’d need to be of a certain calibre, maybe age, before you may even qualify to describe what’s essentially a tatter tale’s gimmick as a collection of ‘memoirs’. It’s not like she desperately needed the money to sell books, and although she insists that this isn’t about ‘revenge’, Vernetta seems to have forgotten that both of them are already happily married, herself to a British IT guy and Mark to a pro-gay NMP hopeful with a 5 year old kid Sol . Beatrice and Mark presumably met on the set of Triple 9 in 1998, playing LOVERS, when Richmond’s marriage was already ‘on the rocks’.
What started out as a concerned friend turned into ugly ‘the other woman’ finger-pointing. No surprises that they got together so soon (married in 2004) after the divorce, a celebrity script uncannily similar to Hollywood’s most famous love triangle (Brad and Angelina were LOVERS in Mr and Mrs Smith, Beatrice even behaves like an Angelina Jolie in some aspects). Interestingly, Mark himself previously played Denise’s boyfriend in ‘Under one Roof’, while both Vernetta and Beatrice were co-actors in the 2001 flop ‘Now Boarding’.
In a 2009 interview, she had this to say about her previous marriage:
Any lessons you’re carrying over from your previous marriage (Her seven-year marriage to Mark Richmond ended in 2004)?
Don’t be the stereotypical needy chick. You just chill and enjoy the relationship. Hold it back a little, man! Not that I was needy before, but I think I became needy after that. I’ve never been in such a tolerant, understanding, fun, relaxed sort of relationship, where you feel comfortable to say anything.
We take it that the chapter of life with Mark is closed?
People always ask. It’s so closed. You do your own thing, I do my own thing. There are no hard feelings or anything anymore. I’ve definitely closed the book on that one.
Er, no Vernetta. You literally WROTE a whole needy BOOK to remind everyone about it. Someday even little Sol is going to get his hands on your book and uncover dirty secrets about Daddy.
Whether it’s a sly publicity stunt or some form of self-victimising ‘autobiography-therapy’, she appears to have refused to let bygones be bygones, and you could feel the searing heat of the dagger in Beatrice Chia’s back when Vernetta used the painfully obvious ‘B’ in her account of the affair. The divorce was already swirling with rumours of the involvement of a ‘third party’, which both denied at the time. But perhaps the way the article was framed says a lot about ST’s lust for gossip as well. Little effort was made in pitching the actual BOOK itself, but rather spilling the beans on a celebrity marriage gone wrong and putting everyone involved in a bad light, despite the ex-couple still being annoyingly cordial to each other, maybe even exchanging gifts and buddy-hugs every Christmas.
In 2007, she was cast as an ‘unhappy woman stuck in a dysfunctional marriage’ in a Channel 5 anthology called Stories of Love. Maybe that didn’t help her deal with her ex because her reel-life groom then was comedian Gurmit Singh. Earlier in 2003, 2 years after the break-up, she was cast in ‘Ceciliation’ as a mother struggling with her husband’s INFIDELITY. She won an Asian Television award for ‘BEST DRAMA PERFORMANCE by an actress’, which suits the DRAMA queen manner in which she’s handling her divorce. Maybe all this vicarious acting has whetted her appetite for finally telling the truth, even if it’s only one person’s side of the story.
Maybe the Richmonds are consulting their own publisher as we speak. They could sneak in a response to Vernetta’s bawling expose amid their Grandfather stories, and call it MEMOIRS of a DJ/ACTOR/PRESENTER/COMMENTATOR. I just hope serial DJ-husband Glenn Ong doesn’t get any ideas. Maybe Vernetta’s ex-husband was indeed a total scoundrel and philanderer but there’s no reason to call him out, dig up the past and package it as a sob-story for money. Instead of calling her book ‘Memoirs of a DJ’ and ripping off a Geisha epic, I think ‘V for Vernetta’ would be more appropriate.
Postscript: Following some nasty feedback about how unfair I have been to Vernetta since the post was based on her media interview and not on the actual pages off her book, I decided to head down to Kinokuniya to check it out myself. Surprisingly, Memoirs wasn’t front entrance promo stock, and I took at least 15 minutes just to locate it inconspicuously stacked along one of the quieter info counters (I couldn’t find a ‘Local series’ section. The only local author on display was LKY). Skimming through the chapters, I found them more like essays than a linear timeline of her life from childhood to second marriage. Her tone was exactly like what you would expect from her character on air, sharp, bitchy, even witty. Yes, Vernetta is funny. I said it. Case in point, she excused Mark’s habit of ‘bringing his phone into the toilet with him’ on the basis that ‘reception is better when the toilet flushes’. LOL.
The chapter on everyone’s mind was titled ‘The dark years’ and it started off bleak, about how V was unsure about the relationship and had to consult her mom, who told her that she could still change her mind before wedding day. Then came the rumours of Mark and Beatrice getting too close for comfort in their scenes together as actors, followed by a self-destructive spell of loathing, niggling doubt (felt like ‘strangers on their honeymoon’) and picking up SMOKING. She even had a table of excuses and lies that Mark had presumably told her, of note one about his filming a movie with a ‘famous director’ that either never existed or bombed so bad it just disappeared. The only mention of ‘B’ came when she was snooping around her husband’s stuff, and found the love note, which, as V wrote, ‘was signed off as ‘B’. It was a piercingly shrewd way of pointing fingers, while ‘telling it like it is’. When confronted, ‘B’ came over to ‘explain’ that the pillow story was taken off some literature to ‘console’ her husband who needed to feel loved again. V thought it was priceless. I call it Occupational Hazard.
I had to flip to the last few chapters on the ‘revelation’, when V, with the help of some friends (or relatives, I can’t remember) ‘staked out’ Mark after work, spotting him and B in each other arms, heads nudged together, and him peeking into her car window supposedly ‘kissing her goodnight’. Game over then, with V going ‘I want a divorce’ at the end of it. Interestingly, other than the ‘B’ reference, no names were mentioned in her account. It wasn’t sleazy at all, and although it did seem a little whiny, was over-CAPPED and tends to overplay female empowerment (V worships Oprah), it was actually entertaining enough for me to finish the chapter in one piece. It was snappy, effortless prose and to pay the compliment further, actually worthy of a second flip, though I skipped those BFF moments with Gurmit Singh.
It’s still one side of the story, but for you all know it could have been a restrained narrative when far worse things could have happened in the affair. I would give V credit for her writing style, for putting a witty spin on something gone horribly wrong, but for making public something that happened years ago, for not letting go, even if she had every damn right to spit on her ex’s new family, I still think it isn’t exactly a discerning thing to do. I also think her new Brit husband better watch his back. Memoirs is both a jibe at her ex and love rival, and a stern warning to her current hubby. I bet he keeps it in the office bookcase to remind himself not to mess with his tenacious wife every single day.
So V isn’t going to win the ‘Revenge Sleaze Book Prize’, but someone thinks she’ll get a Pulitzer. When hell freezes over, that is.
…In a series of Twitter and Facebook posts, Mr Daniel Ong – a former DJ for radio stations in both MediaCorp and SPH’s stables – said he was asked to pay a sum of S$535 for each of the articles featuring his business Twelve Cupcakes or his wife and co-owner Jamie Ong that he had put up on the Twelve Cupcakes website and shared via social media.
He also said he had been charged an additional S$214 for “investigative fees”. According to Mr Ong’s Facebook post, SPH continued to ask payment for the investigative fees even after he agreed to remove the articles from his website.
Mr Ong wrote on his Facebook post: “Did you know? Business owners are not allowed to share stories about themselves on their websites unless they pay … Stalls and cafes can’t photocopy (articles) and put them at their stalls or signboards unless they pay. I never knew that!”
Sweets for his sweet
In May this year, TNP gave a glowing review of 12 cupcakes (3.5/5), in which the the couple revealed the origins of the name (12 holes in a baking tray) and why they decided to go into the confectionery business. Herworld described their creations with the suggestive ‘oh-so-moist’ and the queasy ‘handmade with love’, which got me thinking of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost for some reason. Of course you hardly see a scathing critique of celebrity FnB ventures, though I wonder if ‘star power’, TV appearances, curiosity and word of mouth alone would have been sufficient to drive this sideshow sweet-shop to become the smashing success that it is today. If a well-known celebrity host could get away with naming his food establishment after ‘Porn’, I don’t see anyone else in the media circle getting less than a 3-star review, whether it’s selling cupcakes or char siew rice. National bowler Remy Ong once had a stint selling POPIAH. Long term success, however, is another matter altogether. Think Planet Hollywood.
According to the ST website, the prohibition of unauthorised commercial use of their content is implicitly stated under ‘News Post Enquiry Form’.
To republish any Singapore Press Holdings articles and photographs, please contact us via the request form by providing the following details so that we can revert to you with the necessary copyright fees and license before any republication can be made
Nowhere in the site do you see a ‘Terms and Conditions’ or ‘WARNING’ link, but what bothers me here is not so much why ANYONE would pay SPH hundreds of dollars just to reproduce their material, but the phrase ‘we can REVERT to you’, which is more embarrassing than hounding enterprising celebrities for copyright infringement charges like glorified loan sharks. In the age of copy, rip, burn and ‘RT’s, SPH’s anal-clenching grip on ‘ownership’ seems out of touch with the alternate digital universe in which we’re spending more of our lives, where posting and sharing content has become as natural as breathing. It’s like a a park warden confiscating the canvas from a painter for making an ‘unauthorised copy’ of the sunrise in his premises. Should bloggers who earn advertising revenue from quoting or retweeting ST articles fall under ‘commerical use’ as well? In a 7 July 2012 ST response to this cupcake controversy, other than deferring to the power of copyright law:
SPH confirmed that hawker stalls and cafes can frame up an actual print article for display, but copying it would constitute an infringement of copyright.
Which begs the question of the definition of ‘copying’. It’s understood from the above statement that you can only cut out and laminate ST articles from actual newpapers. You cannot make a photocopy of ST from the library, but can you take a photo of the page then? How about only ‘quoting’ excerpts from the papers? How many words are you allowed to ‘quote’ before it constitutes a violation of identity theft?
Late last year, SPH sued Yahoo news site for ‘free-riding’ on the efforts of their editorial staff. In 2001, Today published apology for using an ST image of a SilkAir pilot (You’re supposed to buy images from their ‘Photobank’). I’m also wondering what amounted to ‘investigative fees’ here; I did the same ‘detective work’ in less than a minute digging up where Daniel Ong posted the SPH links (on his website, duh.) Perhaps instead of paying them the $200 fee, Daniel and Jaime should instead dedicate a limited edition cupcake flavour (in addition to their signature Red Velvet and Chocolate Chocolate) worth that amount in honour of SPH’s dogged diligence in weeding out copycats. They could call it, I dunno, Copyright Crankyberry or something, and become the Ben and Jerry of Cupcakes.
The recipe for a $200 novelty cupcake could be something like this:
1 cup of sugar, 2 cups flour, 2 eggs, 500g salty butter, and whatever stuff that makes cupcakes cupcakes.
3/4 cup of cranberries, 2 tbp artificial vanilla essence, grated blue cheese, prune bits, nata de coco, and a cherry soaked in brandy for 535 days.
A generous sprinkling of gold flakes, a stuffing made up of caramelised $50 bills, and a miniature candy Volkswagen on top.
From ‘Trend of multiple radio DJs sacrifices that old personal touch’ 24 April 2012 and ‘More on what’s wrong with morning radio’ 25 April 2012, ST Forum.
(Victor Khoo): WHY does a person listen to the radio? Apart from getting information, news and music, a radio listener wants someone to keep him company; a proxy for personal, warm and friendly one-to-one companionship.
For the radio listener, that companion is the deejay on air. So the test of a good radio deejay is to be able to communicate with his listeners in a manner that replicates a personal, face-to-face encounter via the restricted confines of audio contact. This is not easy.
…Unfortunately, the new trend among local radio stations is to have two or more deejays hosting one show for reasons fathomable only to these broadcasting stations. I say unfortunately because this trend robs the station of that personal touch.
More often than not, the listener ends up literally as a passive eavesdropper on a bunch of men and women talking and joking among themselves in a cacophony of chatter.
(Chow Hon Meng):…I have concerns as well about radio stations, particularly the morning show on Gold 90FM, hosted by Brian Richmond and his son Mark, who have been joined by MediaCorp actor Gurmit Singh.
Why must the peak-hour morning time slot have an advisory warning that parental guidance is needed for listeners? Isn’t it obvious that a morning show covers the period when families are having breakfast together before leaving for school and work?
I am no prude, but should we ‘licence’ radio deejays who wish to swop raunchy jokes at 9am? Surely, there are more appropriate time slots for a round-the-clock medium like radio?
Gold 90FM’s tripartite father-son-actor deejay format makes listeners like me feel like eavesdroppers because of the family-show slant. The Richmonds try to regale listeners with grandfather stories, literally at times; there are also occasions when a grandson or son calls in or one of the three is busy reading a personal SMS from his wife.
Three's a crowd
I’ve ever only heard the Richmonds hosting a show together a few times and though not exactly a hoot, it was amusing to have the younger Richmond tease the elder veteran with the latter lacking any sort of comeback whatsoever. Brian’s velvety baritone doesn’t seem appropriate for the sort of wacky humour you would want to wake up to or end the day with. It’s like laughing at Barry White or the Pope and I suspect the old man would be overwhelmed by Phua Chu Kang joining in the fray. Perhaps this a desperate plea for ratings, and it’s a shame that the homely, orange-juice and cereal vibe of the Richmonds show has to resort to cheap morning antics by adding an obvious comedian in. It’s like lathering waffles with condensed milk. Over the top.
Trios in shows mean more banter, less music, as each presenter tends to wrestle for attention, and to me, three’s a definite crowd. But somehow it’s the duos that crank up the sleaze, especially around the time when the kids are packing their school bags. You also don’t hear of all female DJ teams because you always need a male to bear the brunt of jokes or dispense toilet humour. Morning shows are notorious for bawdiness and DJs getting fined or sacked for it, whether it’s asking boys about white panties, getting people to moan like they’re having sex on air, mocking Indian accents or getting beauty contestants to strip off their bras without exposing themselves. Even the titles of such shows are dead giveaways for the kind of ‘no holds barred’ content that attract listeners: Morning Glory, Five Guys and a Girl, Rude Awakening etc, which all sound like titles of 90′s porn VCDs. But put a couple of men or opposite sexes together long enough and eventually you’ll have to stumble on a sexual topic somehow or other. Or at least a fart joke, or politically incorrect discussions on male-female stereotypes. Otherwise it’s traffic on the PIE and headlines of the day. You might as well tune in to a recording of yesterday’s Toto result announcements.
There could be a few explanations as to why Mediacorp is dropping the ‘personal touch’. Jokes and anecdotes are always funnier shared, and a DJ unleashing those while alone in the studio, without the satisfaction of a human response, is like a stand up comedian trying to tickle a wall. It also helps that laughter is contagious, and we’re more likely to laugh along if another DJ laughs at his partner’s joke than if the latter cracks one alone, or if he/she does at all. When someone else laughs, we acknowledge that a joke has been made. When someone laughs at his own joke, we wonder what’s so funny. We’re no longer the lonely souls who want Brian Richmond or William Xavier to coddle us with their rich, chocolately voices and tuck us into bed anymore. We don’t need the ‘company’ (the Internet provides too much of that already), we just want to be entertained. Sometimes it’s not so much the content of the banter, but the power plays lurking within that’s captivating, like how one DJ tends to dominate another, or trying to tease apart the rapport from the filler. In a way it is indeed like eavesdropping on a couple of roommates bitching, and trying to guess who wears the pants in the relationship. But what’s wrong with that?
Today’s listeners crave for gossip, weird news and quirky facts, not just because they’re light-hearted and entertaining, but because they feed our cries for attention whenever we relay such information to our friends, family and co-workers. Radio gossip and jokes empower us socially by enhancing our watercooler small-talk skills. It weathers those awkward silences during those long drives in your boss’s car. Not that a solo DJ can’t deliver these with aplomb (it takes great talent and charisma), but humans are more attuned to heated conversations than a lone ranger telling us which important person’s birthday it is today or asking us whether we’ve had breakfast or not, even if he or she has the perkiest, rosiest, maple-syrupy, dewiest, morning sunshine voice in the history of radio.
From ‘Radio DJ in trouble for reporting on Circle Line breakdown’, 14 Dec 2011, article in Asiaone.com
Local radio personality Hossan Leong was reportedly censured for announcing the disruption to the Circle Line train services this morning. The deejay was allegedly rapped because his announcement came before an official statement was released by SMRT.
He had reported on the delays based on tweets that he received. In another tweet at about 9am this morning, Hossan commented that he was now “getting into trouble” for reporting the incident on-air. Hossan revealed that he could only “talk about it if (an) official SMRT statement is given”.
It is not clear whether the warning came from MediaCorp or SMRT.
Mediacorp’s Trafficwatch hotline plays a similar role to Twitter except that listeners call in to report on road congestion or accidents rather than MRT delays. How is information dialed in from a random listener at the wheel more reliable, or ‘official’, than a commuter tweeting a train breakdown? Hossan wasn’t tweeting about a terrorist hijack, or people jumping in front of trains or anything that could cause unnecessary alarm, yet the way a simple well-meaning alert was handled here comes across as a clumsy, conspiratorial , cahoots-y cover-up by both Mediacorp and SMRT as if it wasn’t a signalling roblem that stalled the trains, but a rampant zombie infestation instead. Perhaps they needed time to double-confirm?
The official word from Channel News Asia was ‘communication network problem’. A few months earlier in September it was ‘leaks and a damaged cable’. The responsible authorities seem preoccupied with figuring out WHY the train was stalled rather than giving passengers an early heads-up. Whether it was an explosion, a derailing or someone jumping on the tracks, people still need to get to work. Announce, divert, THEN deliver your official statement. It’s like the police/military refraining from telling people to stay at home and lock their doors if a dark menacing cloud with crackling green lightning suddenly occupied half the sky, waiting for the meterologists to give an official diagnosis, by which time our streets would have been already littered with crisp, smoldering human remains. Some of us suffer a worse fate if we’re ever late for meetings. A hundred heads may roll out of a single delay but the one head that matters somehow remains in place.
I experienced first-hand the morning delay myself at Marymount station, where the staff were all at sea trying to placate a frustrated crowd demanding speedy answers. A bewildered auntie exclaimed ‘Train SPOILT ah’, Cisco auxillary police officers had to take up temporary SMRT staff roles to guide passengers, and not a single soul thought of setting up a signboard to tell us what’s happening. I would be surprised if the control station was even equipped with a permanent marker. Hossan was spot on, the train was ‘down’, even if the term SMRT would prefer to use is ‘delay’, but Marymount was in chaos as early as 8 am and services resumed only 3 hours later. This was no delay; it was a breakdown, a stupefying system failure that befits the name of a network and its authority that persist in running RINGS around commuters with one useless apology after another.
As easy as it is to blame the transport authorities for not meeting even the most basic requirements of public commute, this mini-crisis also brought out both the best and worst in Singaporeans. I saw ordinary individuals taking leadership to keep everyone’s heads together, strangers diverting others away from the station and towards the right shuttle buses in the absence of any signs. I witnessed people who otherwise wouldn’t even look at each other engaging fervently in complaints, bonding through anger and disappointment in an organisation they are beginning to lose faith in, topics ranging from regretting their voting choice in the past elections to the recent taxi fare hikes. You’re more likely to talk to a fellow Singaporean stranger when something goes horribly wrong than if he were just next to you at the National Day Parade.
I was late, but thankful that I wasn’t trampled in a riot, because Singaporeans as a pragmatic lot would rather work towards a contingency plan than harp on something that can’t be resolved with complaints alone. Most commuters at Marymount took the incident lightly, queuing up patiently outside the bus bridging services despite being late for work, messaging their bosses to explain, friends to complain, or sending tweets to radio personalities like Hossan Leong hoping they could put the SMRT whack-jobs to shame. If anything, SMRT should be grateful that we are a cooperative lot, though that is often mistaken for ‘powerless’. Transport Minister Lui, Where the Tuck are Yew?
From ‘Did Glenn Ong really say that?’, 19 Sept 2011, article by Gerald Goh, Teh Jen Lee, TNP
SHE couldn’t quite believe her ears when she was listening to the radio last Thursday. DJ Glenn Ong had related an encounter he had with a “crazy” woman who caused chaos in a restaurant a segment of The Morning Show on Class 95 FM.
The listener, a 33-year-old corporate trainer who wanted to known only as Sabrina, said Ong went on to say that the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) should be responsible in making sure “these people” are not out in public.
When TNP contacted Ong yesterday, and asked if he had used the sentence about “putting mad dogs to sleep” on air, he said: “Roughly.” But he clarified that he was reading an SMS response from a listener.
It’s hard to judge if Glenn Ong was discriminating against mentally ill patients from the report above, or whether it was a case of him using the overused and trivialised ‘crazy’ the way most people would say it everyday, like ‘the weather is crazy’, ‘don’t be crazy’ or ‘ you’re crazy not to accept the promotion’ i.e on ‘normal’ people. If you think about it, we hardly ever call individuals with overt psychotic ailments i.e autistim or schizophrenia ‘crazy’, not to mention bring it up on national radio unless this woman’s behaviour was typical of a demanding, aggressive customer which angered the DJ to the point that he would resort to cursing euthanasia upon her. If you look at the spectrum of synonyms for a mad person, you’ll realise they become more euphemistic as the words get longer. Mad, crazy, psycho, lunatic, deranged, mentally ill, schizophrenic, neurotransmitter-imbalanced. Like Glenn, most of us pause to find the right word to describe someone who needs medical attention, but do not hesitate to call our boss, wife or teacher ‘mad’.
It’s likely that Glenn was using ‘crazy’ in the figurative sense, and mistiming the association with IMH and mad dogs to give the listener the impression that he thinks all mental patients who are ‘let loose’ in public should be put down, when it’s likely that the target of his rant isn’t a mental patient at all, but a difficult diner who displayed all the traits of a rabid, wild animal in heat. Nonetheless, any call to forcibly put to sleep any human, sane or insane, on the air (even if as a joke) would be taken as inciting discriminatory violence by sensitive listeners rather than a quick-tempered outburst by a radio personality whose impulsiveness is reflected in his serial marriages.
Not the first time of course, that this veteran ‘shock-jock’ got into trouble over the air. In 2007, Class 95 FM was fined $5k when Glenn and long time partner Flying Dutchman discussed if men and women should make noise during sex on air. Early last year, the same duo remarked that the ‘top 10 most trustworthy’ Singaporeans‘ according to Reader’s Digest ‘could not be trusted’ at all. Glenn has always struck me as a no holds barred, unapologetic ‘wise guy’ known for his cynical barbs and observations, part of a Morning Show charm that appeals not just to his fans but specifically to certain females in the same profession. There must be something marketable about his scruffy attitude which makes Mediacorp stick with him all these years. Or maybe Class 95 FM is just ‘crazy’ not to let him go.
Postscript: Glenn later feigned amnesia about quoting the ‘mad dog’ SMS, with Vice President Sandra Chan clarifying that Glenn intended to say that IMH should ‘lock up these people for public safety’, based on an isolated incident with a ‘mentally unstable’ person in China. To elaborate (What DJ meant to say was.., 24 Sept 2011, TNP):
“He did not mean to link these individuals to ‘crazy dogs’. What he meant to say was that if a dog had attacked someone, measures would be taken, so in the same vein, mentally unstable people should be monitored to protect other members of the public from danger.
“He apologises unreservedly if his comments were deemed insensitive and might have caused undue distress to his listeners.”
It’s not clear what Glenn experienced at the restaurant, but if the ‘crazy’ woman had indeed gone ‘postal’ and tossed cutlery at random diners, he might have a point, but the change of tune from ‘putting down’ the mentally ill to ‘monitoring and locking them up if necessary’ is opening up another can of vitriol for critics to ‘go mental’ on him. A simple, personal apology would have sufficed, though the damage is done and we won’t see the likes of Glenn taking part in the President’s Star Charity anytime soon.
From ‘F**k word seen on Channel 5′, 29 Aug 2011, article in insing.com translated from SM Daily
Former radio DJ Danny Yeo posted on his blog yesterday that he had spotted the F word appearing in a Channel 5 programme. The gaffe is understood to have come from the programme “Last Man Standing” which airs at 11pm on Sundays.
Danny uploaded a screenshot of the programme on his blog and commented that TV seems to have trumped newspapers in media freedom.
The former DJ remarked that even newspapers had universally refrained from printing the F word during the recent uproar over Trinetta Chong, the valedictorian at an Nanyang Technological University (NTU) convocation ceremony who uttered a profanity at the end of her speech.
Member of Parliament Teo Ser Luck also added his take on the issue. He said that vulgarities should not be appearing on TV, and that the broadcaster should consider the thoughts and feelings of different segments of society. He emphasises that this may convey improper messages to the young.
Channel 5 has apologised for the gaffe and attributed it to a technical error. The Media Development Authority (MDA) is investigating the incident.
That sounds serious
Last Man Standing is about pitting the puny urban male physique against the battle-worn chassis of the tribal warrior in a bid to prove whether modern life has made us wimpy. Which explains why contestants may overcompensate by spouting language taken in the city context to be an indication of raw masculinity, or rather bearing a bark worse than his bite. Even veteran users would be stumped by this substitution of ‘fuck’ for verbs which are sufficiently harsh and descriptive to begin with: hurt, hit, injured, scraped, sprained, twisted etc. If he had bumped his head would he say ‘I ‘fucked’ my head’? What if he got knocked on the buttocks? The use of the F word here doesn’t amplify the emotional impact of the injury, and the non-carnal use of ‘fuck’ as a verb is often restricted to sweeping ambiguity rather than to replace a specific force, such as ‘fuck it’ (the hell with it) or ‘This project is fucked’ (doomed). The more appropriate expression, without making one’s statement sound like a depraved auto-erotic act, would be ‘I got thrown yesterday and hurt my ‘fucking’ knee’. But that’s besides the point. This snippet should have been bleeped from the source, and we wouldn’t know if gritty profanity was the producers’ intention, or Mediacorp simply inherited a production error.
So much work has gone into the details of defining restrictions for PG-13 movies that the Board of Censors somehow let this TV gaffe slip by. But the irony is that children are spending more time online over TV, where they are more likely to pick up more creative permutations of the f word, be it through forums, video streaming or by downloading music, which makes regulating TV and programme subtitles somewhat like plugging a sinking boat with cotton balls. We persist in it because we still see our broadcasters to be responsible role models, being both educators and entertainers, while this invisible moderator is absent in the new media. We have somehow personalised the TV as a nanny surrogate, which makes us less tolerant to profanity if TV is supposed to be keeping the kids occupied while we work. But that’s not saying that television shouldn’t be censored. It should and will be for as long as TV exists, but only because we can, and it gives the Board of Censors people a job to do. Trinetta Chong’s ‘fucking did it’ speech has nothing to do with this mistake, and newspapers haven’t ‘refrained’ from printing the F word according to Danny Yeo. They were NEVER SUPPOSED TO at all.
(Leonard Glenn Freeman): …As concerned parents and Catholics, we take offence to the promotion of her album (Lady Gaga’s Born This Way) and the songs in it. Lyrics of Bloody Mary, Judas and Black Jesus Amen Fashion border on blasphemous. This goes against the country’s values in respecting different faiths and beliefs…It was a surprise to us that the album carries no parental advisory warning.
…We would like to call on the Media Development Authority to ban the sale of her album in Singapore
The last time an album was banned in Singapore it was over pornographic lyrics, courtesy of Janet Jackson and in particular the song ‘Would you mind’ (lyrics below). Incidentally you can easily download the song from Youtube (1 million hits and counting) and it’s easy to see from the stats why banning music only serves to popularise it, despite the fact that the song itself is pretty unimpressive. Janet Jackson even performed here recently, so either our society have matured since then, or we just plain forgot that we ever objected to her moaning and groaning off that song in the first place.
Kiss you, suck you, taste you, ride you
Feel you deep inside me ohh
I’m gonna
Kiss you, suck you, taste you, ride you,
Feel you, make you come too
Not wanting to sound like a prude myself, I’m surprised no one has taken megastarlet Rihanna to task for equally suggestive lyrics. In ‘Rude Boy’, she goes ‘Come here, rude boy, boy, can you get it up? Come here, rude boy, boy, is you big enough?, though what really bothers me here is not the cheap allusion to penis size, but the grammatical catastrophe of ‘IS YOU BIG ENOUGH?’, which, surely, has more negative effects on our kids than admiration for treacherous biblical characters in a Lady Gaga song. Or how about the recent one titled ‘S and M’, which goes:
Cause I may be bad, but I’m perfectly good at it
Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But chains and whips excite me
But back to Lady Gaga, Judas has ‘Even prophets forgave his crooked way…A king with no crown’, which seems to suggest that the backstabbing Judas was equally deserving of Jesus’ crown. In ‘Bloody Mary’, it’s ‘Like Jesus said, I’m gonna dance dance dance, hands above my head, dance together…Forgive him before he’s dead’, which makes Jesus more human and fun-loving than he’s supposed to be, and also uses the word ‘dead’ to describe his crucification when he’s anything but. ‘Black Jesus’ has ‘Black Jesus, black Jesus, black Jesus …Jesus is the new Black’, which has racial undertones and compares religion to fashion (she does have a point there). It seems that Lady Gaga has taken after nineties Madonna, who fired up Christian loins with songs like ‘Like a Prayer’, and whether it’s Kabbalah mysticism or Judah-fetishes, this love-her-or-hate-her attention is exactly what these seminal artistes are out to provoke. Nothing sells like controversy, and controversy feeds off the conservative minds like those of this complainant.
So on one hand you have a singer trivialising the Greatest Story Ever Told though some academics would see this religious posturing as a schmaltzy commentary on Christianity, while you’re allowing singers like Rihanna to teach our kids bad grammar and spread the gospel of sadomasochism. Either way, banning such music will only add fuel to this blasphemous fire, and if God-fearing Catholics would have their way, they’ll ban the Internet too, which has far worse blasphemous insults and Jesus parodies than their pure minds could ever imagine. I ran a check on classic Christian hymn lyrics and ironically Lady Gaga’s ‘blasphemous’ album is a pinprick compared to the bloodshed extolled by some of these ‘worship’ songs. I’d rather have my kids listen to a song about funky Judas than blood in a fountain. Here’s a sample of the sort of violent cannibalistic imagery Christians have been exposed to for centuries, and you shall be forgiven for thinking that I took these out of some death metal band.
There is a Fountain Filled with Blood
Dear dying Lamb, thy precious blood
shall never lose its power
till all the ransomed church of God
be saved, to sin no more.
Go to Dark Gethesmane
See him at the judgment hall,
beaten, bound, reviled, arraigned;
O the wormwood and the gall!
O the pangs his soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss;
learn of Christ to bear the cross.
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
King of kings, yet born of Mary,
as of old on earth he stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
in the body and the blood;
he will give to all the faithful
his own self for heavenly food.
From ‘Heartlanders not cultured enough for Holland Village’, 24 March 2011, article in Yahoo! News Singapore
…(Samantha, caller on 91.3 FM’s The Married Men show): “I live in Holland Village, and I just can’t understand why people from the heartlands want to come here. We people are cultured, and you heartlanders are definitely not cultured,” she said.
She defines heartlanders as being “people from Ang Mo Kio, Yishun, Toa Payoh and the nearby Bukit Batok” who “have no manners”, “talk loudly” and wear “cheap clothes from Bugis Street”.
“People who come here are cultured. So if you want to come here, you know, when you’re in Rome, behave like a Roman. When you’re in Holland, behave like us — cultured people. “
Er no, when in Rome, you do as the Romans do, you eat in their coffee houses, you drink their water, but you don’t start talking or acting like a Caesar. And to compare Holland V, with hardly an historical artifact remaining worthy of notice, to an ancient European metropolis can only be the kind of lazy analogy someone who hasn’t the faintest idea about culture would come up with. Holland Village is not even a ‘sleepy’ enclave anymore, now fueled by the cheap buzz of pub crawlers, school kids, expats and horrible parking. There’s no atrium to facilitate intellectual discourse, no eccentric gypsy shops, not even cobblestoned walkways, and the hawker centre is as ‘heartland’-ish as all the others in the country, meaning foreign workers plying their trade, lunchtime workers drinking chin chow, people choping seats with tissue paper, and stinky public toilets with entrance fees 10 cents more expensive than the ones in ‘Ang Mo Kio, Yishun or Bukit Batok’. And they have a shop selling fake Crocs as well as a Sasa too. Real classy, Samantha.
Of course, this could very well be a radio scam or premature April Fool’s joke to boost ratings because the snobbishness comes across as rather far-fetched, and we’re too small and dense a nation to accommodate the likes of elitist snobs like Samantha, who, despite sounding like a rich man’s daughter whose face you can’t resist thwacking with the most heartland weapon you may think of (a tie between a Sinha beer bottle and an auntie’s wet market trolley) is highly unlikely to get away with such a comment without losing some inevitable heartland friends. A good time to revisit old Holland V though, which emerged in the late eighties as a haunt for an extinct species of Singaporeans known, rather unflatteringly, as ‘yuppies’ (Holland Avenue comes alive with a different charm for a mixed crowd, 13 Oct 1989). Who remembers ‘Shakey’s Pizza’?
Holland V even has a long running Mediacorp drama serial filmed about it, and it’s not exactly Singapore’s version of Melrose Place, judging from its lowest denominator melon jokes that even kopitiam uncles would refrain from using to impress their beer ladies (see clip below). Which adds to my suspicion that this ‘Samantha’ jig is really a ploy to get people excited about radio talk shows again, maybe even rev up some much needed solidarity among Singaporeans by creating an irrational fear of social divide. All at the expense of stereotyping heartlanders as country bumpkin folk who speak mangled Singlish, can’t pronounce macchiato when facing a ‘barista’, can’t handle R21 movies in their hometowns, or take sleazy videos of Miss Worlds parading around their malls in bikinis.
