Zhao Benshan (right) plays a farmer during the Spring Festival Gala. The show was criticized for being insensitive to farmers. Photo: CFP

By Fu Wen

The star-studded Spring Festival Gala aired more than two weeks ago but the negative reviews were still pouring in last night, the Lantern Festival.

The five-hour variety show, which airs on the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year, is watched by hundreds of millions of people who gather around the TV set after a family dinner, year after year.

While few people dare to miss the musicians, magicians, comedians and short skits on the program, many are pointing to a lack of creativity and orginality.

Yang Zhiyu, a PhD candidate at the Beijing Institute of Technology, told the Global Times Thursday that he was disappointed in one part of the show that was supposed to be funny but fell flat.

"There was nothing new in the cross-talk programs, and Zhao Benshan's skit was in poor taste with no innovation," Yang said.

Zhao, a popular figure on television, received the first prize last night during the Lantern Festival gala for his performance in the February 2 gala.

The prize was given after two weeks of voting by viewers.

However, many described his show as hollow and vulgar.

Family tradition

The Spring Festival Gala has been produced by CCTV since the 1980s and features abundant singing, dancing and comedy skits. It easily attracts about 1 billion viewers and has become a custom for most Chinese people to watch and usher in the New Year as firecrackers light up the sky outside.

This year, the Internet was overloaded with critical comments minutes after the show wrapped up. This happened although CCTV said it worked harder and spent more money to make the show more attractive.

During the show, some members of the live audience displayed facial fatigue at the glitter on stage and were not laughing at skits meant to amuse.

Zhao, China's "Skit King" and a frequent guest on the gala show for more than a decade, routinely play the role of a farmer from Northeast China. This year, his show featured a man who visited his first lover and stirred up a controversy with a woman's current husband.

Many Internet users said that Zhao's skit veered too far from reality and the way he and the other performers portrayed villagers was offensive.

CCTV said a survey they conducted showed that 82 percent of the audience was satisfied with the show's quality. However, an online survey conducted by sina.com found more than 70 percent of some 10,000 respondents were not satisfied with this year's gala show, among which 35 percent voters gave the show only 20 points out of 100.

While it is understood that not everyone or all age group are expected to embrace the programs, expectations are high every year, but this year it appears more and more people have a problem with the show.

Sun Haifeng, deputy director of the media division at College of Mass Communication, Shenzhen University, told the Global Times Thursday that producers of the show have a tough job since the public has countless new ways to find entertainment including the Internet, DVDs and foreign programming.

"Audiences don't accept the gala show as they used to because they are more mature and able to choose their own entertainment programs now, so shows with low taste and mere political publicity cannot win over people's hearts," Sun said.

Who's it for?

Zhou Xiaozheng, director of the Law and Sociology Research Center at the Renmin University of China, said political influence over the gala show leads people to feel like the show is not meant for them.

Barry Cunningham, a TV reporter in the US who has lived in China and watched the gala show several times, told the Global Times that he too was disappointed at this year's show because there were no memorable highlights. He recalled deaf-mute girls and boys who performed the Buddha with a Thousand Arms dance routine three years ago.

The show was well received because the performers did a great job and had rhythm even though they could not hear the music. They got instructions from a sign language teacher.

"I agree with the critics who say the skits were demeaning to rural people in modern-day China and this may not be the image of China that sophisticated people want to project to an international TV audience," Cunningham said.

"The same criticisms were heard after the 2010 gala, so I am surprised that CCTV continued to depict farmers in scruffy clothes, hunkered down in servile squats like street beggars, and expressing themselves in very crude ways," Cunningham said.

Zhou from Renmin University described the show as a "political tool" for some officials who failed to consider the entertainment value. He said there should be multiple shows on that special night.

"Although the show invited migrant workers to sing on the stage, the singers were more of a tool used by the show to appeal to the public rather than touch people's heart," Zhou said.