Bread and circus

Christina Kirchner's government has been beset by scandals, as is par for the course in Argentina. To drum up support, in 2009 the government made the populist move of announcing free football for everybody. Widely advertised as fútbol para todos, the formerly pay-per-view matches of the Argentinian league could now be seen by everyone. Argentinians being extremely passionate about their football, this would seem to be a brilliant strategy.

However, that thing about free lunches quickly reared its head. When signing off a big fat check to the AFA (Argentinian Football Association) for the broadcast rights on public TV, the wildly optimistic government announced it would not cost the treasury a single peso. In fact, it would reap profits, to be given to amateur sports, through ads and sales to international markets.

This business model turned out less than satisfying. Almost no ad time was bought by the private sector (representing a meagre 0,24% of income needed to balance the books), so the slot had to be filled by government ads like the striking, nation-building "Do we have what it takes to be a Great Country? The answer is, YES!". Even with government money paying for screen time, more than half the bill for "free football" was unaccounted for.

End result was that last week the government had to reroute 144 million pesos earmarked for the provinces, sustainable development and coordination of environmental policies. Fútbol pagan todos (football paid by everybody).

Korean e-sport bizarro

Expanding on the previous post on South Korean TV's live transmission of so-called "e-sport", this is the studio found on top of a shopping mall in central Seoul. The show featured two contestants along with promogirls and three quite enthusiastic presenters.


The live audience largely consisted of teenage girls and nerds like this. Like most others in the audience he had made a sign cheering on his favourite player, ready to lift it up to when the cameras required. Sadly for him, the cameras preferred to focus on the girls' elaborate anime-style drawings of their favourite cute player.

Worse, when two professional players appeared to take a seat in the audience, they pointedly ignored his attempts at communication, understandably rather opting for flirting with the female presence. Nice social microcosm right there.


No introduction of players complete without screams.


Game over!

Global TV: Starcraft, mail-order brides and food porn

While I have not been watching a lot of TV on this round-the-world trip (apart from Argentinian football of course), what I have seen does grant some insight into different cultures. And as always, it is the weird shit that tickles the interest the most.

In South Korea for instance, there are multiple channels broadcasting live matches of the 10-year old computer game Starcraft, still massively popular on the peninsula. The best players are treated as minor celebrities, as I saw when happening upon the TV studio on the top floor of a huge shopping mall. The production was very dramatic and came across as an enthusiastically nerdy sporting event.

The weirdest thing to be seen in Taiwan's late night TV are long shows of Vietnamese brides, who get a five-minute segment each to dance around semi-provocatively in flimsy clothing, while the essential figures about them are displayed, including the number to call if you feel like marrying one. Taiwanese men will spend close to 10k USD for a marriage to be set up, and the business is popular enough that the ethnic demographics of Taiwan are changing. Crass commercialisation of human relations or just efficient marketing?

Cooking shows are also widely popular in Taiwan, but not to the insane degree of Japan. Food porn is always on, and while given the extremely high standard of Japanese cuisine a certain focus in understandable, but not to the obsessive degree of these shows. Frequent, loving pornographic closeups of bubbling dishes are accompanied by tacky music and idiotic commentary. This is all a build-up to the money shot of a celebrity or just an average Joe finally tasting the dish, unfailingly exclaiming "Oishii!" (delicious) with an orgasmic grin, non-pixellated. Apparently this is what Japanese viewers want, certainly there is a telling lack of a debating public sphere in the media. Harmony and harmless food is the order of the day in Japan Inc.

Over in Argentina the national obsession of Maradona-land is of course football. It is everywhere in daily life and of course all over the media. In addition to fluff like interviews on the daily lives of players and their families, there is an in-depth show called "Ping-Pong", which shows every goal chance of the match, adding them up and coming up with a ping-pong score of missed chances, thereby providing an analysis of who really should have won. The ball is, as we know, round. I eagerly await the hypothetical Hooligan: The day-to-day life of an Argentinian mobster.