Vreau să fiu vedetă

This weekly televisual highlight may just be a poor copy of the X factor, with (frankly) rather boring judges, but it certainly has me spellbound!

Vreau să fiu vedetă works on the premise that children are always good for being exploited, especially if their parents are particularly pushy. Although some are undoubtedly talented, many are just over rehearsed puppets. This video being a good example (although he is very cute!)

The show is not without charm – the kids dancing along next to the stage are quite adorable, especially wwhen they dress up! But otherwise the programme just seems wrong, and on so many levels.

For starters, you can't have failed to have noticed the presenters. The one with the facial hair just seems creepy to me. He gets far too close to the kids, and basically just reminds me of the kind of man your mum told you never to take sweets from.

Far more worrying, I think, is the lap dancer female presenter who is dancing with the kids. This video sees her very tamely dressed. The first time I saw this show, just before Christmas she was trussed up like a turkey, being as she seemed just to be wearing just a small piece of Bacofoil. "Anyone for breast? There's plenty to go around." (Incidentally, the Frog's first words upon seeing the lovely Miss Ionescu were "Quelle Horeur!" so it's not just me being jealous.)

I'm not saying she shouldn't show off her cleavage/legs (if I looked like that I imagine I'd want to dress like her too) but when presenting a programme aimed at, and depicting, children, I am a firm believer in less is more!

(*although it would appear that Roxana is already an adept of this expression from a quick search on YouTube; please only watch this if you are not easily offended .I don't think you'll find any clips like this of Blue Peter presenters*)

Asides from the fact that the show is presented by a pedophile and a porn star, that it lasts a interminably long time, and the judges only give benign praise, the other big problem with the show is its treatment of the guests. The kids are usually accompanied by their parents in the studio who are interviewed on a sofa by old double-D Dora (needless to say that they don't know where to look) and they show a film of the family at home so that grandparents and neighbours can get on the telly as well! The worst example was when a family of very poor farmers took their daughter on the show. The video showed how the family lived in a remote hut without mains water, sewerage or electricity (surprisingly common outside of large towns and the parents were wearing old worn out clothes. They'd obviously sold a few goats to get the kid something nice to wear (a traditional Romanian costume) which the judges all praised her on. They had to really; the unfortunate girl had no real talent to speak of and was clearly the night's token charity case. To add insult to injury, the presenter with the bad face pubes said (and you'll have to excuse my paraphrasing, my Romanian being not the best)

"We see your poor so we bought you some presents", at which point Mlle Il y a du monde sûr le balcon
enters the studio with a wheelbarrow containing farm animals. Unfortunately nobody had thought about how the animals might react to this and they fled from the bright lights and applause as fast as they could, with the poor piglet practically breaking its neck in its bid to clamber out of the ill-thought out means-of-transportation. I don't remember exactly what the other presents were but I seem to remember a basket of yoghurts and raw meat (bet that smelt lovely under the studio lights) and probably some chickens. I'm tempted to say there were cows too but I think I might have made that up. In any case the whole thing was grotesque and the family were speechless (and not through joy). If they really had to be so crass, couldn't they just have given them money and avoided the impending lawsuit from animal rights campaigners (if there are any watching Vreau să fiu vedetă)?

If it gets any worse, I'll let you know.

Today’s headlines

"I can't believe the news today. I can't close my eyes and make it go away"

Not just a rather trite reference to U2, but the actual, honest-to-God truth.

These were all genuine items of news on the lunchtime edition. Should I be scared that they are all related to death???

First up was the grizzly story of a mother and daughter were found dead in their flat. The discovery was made after...yes, you've guessed it, residents of the block of flats complained of the smell coming from their dwelling. It is thought that the daughter suffered a heart attack and the mother, who was bed-bound, subsequently died of starvation and dehydration. I put down the digestive, no longer feeling hungry.

Next was a story from my (new) home town, Buzău. Keeping on the same theme, a family stood with official documents of their relative who had been the posthumous victim of a gross administration error. This poor man had apparently been in the fridge of a morgue for TWO YEARS because his name got left off a list of some kind. There was a kind of bizarre altercation between the family and the staff of the mortuary which I didn't really understand and one woman barged inside what looked like a the concrete bunker and emerged, triumphant but shaking to confirm the man's identity. I'm not really sure of the upshot of all this was, but I was beginning to feel like I was watching some twisted misadventure in TV programming, a sort of Watchdog-cum-Romania's Worst Civil Servants. I'd certainly never seen such a strange culmination of stories on any news bulletin before. It was a far cry from the Anglia News* and its comfy sofa.

*as a little aside here, I would just like to share this investigative journalism gem from the Eastern Counties that I had the fortune to witness a few years ago. One of the top stories that evening was about the regions oldest lightbulb that had seen its light extinguished after 90 years of service. This could be "verified" by what looked like the regions oldest resident, who specifically remembered his father putting in the lightbulb (it being state-of-the-art technology back then) and was accompanied by the "testimonies" of various friends and neighbours who had taken an interest in the 40 watt bulb over the years. Shocking platitudes were bandied around, how the bulb would be "missed", a piece of the past "lost forever" and I think the old bloke even shed a tear. Report over, they returned to the studio where I expected to see the two presenters, not on the usual sofa, but inside barrels, energetically scraping the bottoms. But no, unabashed and comfortably seated they smiled inanely, inviting viewers; "If you've got an object that had lasted a really long time, FOR EXAMPLE A PEN!!!!, why not write to us as Anglia News… I bet the production team were secretly glad when Tony Martin shot that boy on his farm just to have something newsworthy happen in the region.*

So back to today's news, the next story was by far the most disturbing, not just for the information itself, but also the video footage. Inside a particularly sparsely furnished flat sat an old woman, crying as she has just lost her husband. Yet, for some reason I'm not able to understand (she's too poor, doesn't want to, no-one to help???) her husband's body is still in the flat. Zoom out to reveal the deceased on the bed behind her, wrapped in what looked an old carpet. I nearly choked on my cuppa! His face may have been pixilated but this didn't disguise the fact that it had turned blue. Underneath scrolled the all-important salacious information – this woman had slept next to the corpse for the past two nights! Cue pounding at the door as local residents demand that something is done; the old woman, resplendent in her apron, headscarf and wellington boots is angry and starts swearing, a crowd gathering on the stairwell. I check to see that this is still the news and not a Romanian Jerry Springer Show. There seems to me to be that nasty air of voyeurism; we're successful journalists and live in comfortable flats in affluent Bucharest, let's make some footage about how the other half are doing! It really brings home the huge divides there are here, and what a large number of social problems still need to addressed.

Outside the flats, a neighbour had cleared out the back of his old transit van, presumably to cart off the cadaver, whilst more people loitered outside, angling for few seconds of small-screen celebrity, where one day they could look back on the day they said "we're worried that if the dead body's going to start to smell" to the nation. Or some such.

So, in just a few minutes the news had come full circle, and we were back on the subject of decomposing flesh. At this point I phased out of trying to concentrate on what was said and just marveled at the on-screen banners – man in one year battle to prove his identity after he was apparently reported dead, children killed in house fire caused by gas leak – continued their morbid tirade of news. I reached for the remote.

If nothing else, it really has brought home to me just how different living in Romania is to anywhere I've been before.

And people think that I'm backward because I come from Norfolk! You don't know the half of it.