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Huang Yihe, director in charge of singing and dancing programming at CCTV, stared out of the window of his temporary courtyard office in Beijing and contemplated his predicament.
It was a snowy day in the November of 1982, and Huang’s boss had just instructed him to organize a TV gala for the upcoming Spring Festival, a task that would make or break his career. It was just a few years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the growing popularity of televisions, along with a sharp public hunger for entertainment—which had been left languishing through the last decade—meant that Huang was on the brink of either a monumental breakthrough or a humiliating failure. Thankfully, Huang wouldn’t have to completely invent the wheel. Back in 1956, China’s Central News Documentary Film Studio had forged a rough blueprint with their film“Grand Get-together at Spring Festival,” which celebrated the year’s end with a motley group of entertainers, literary figures, military officials, businessmen and scientists.
This provided a template for later shows to follow, but it was not until China emerged from the televisual doldrums of the Cultural Revolution that a similar format saw the light of day. The 1978 broadcast of CCTV’s “Gala to Welcome the New Year” marked the beginning of the show’s modern evolution. While it pioneered the integration of old and new forms of entertainment—storytelling, crosstalk, Peking Opera, singing and dancing—the show only reached a limited audience due to the paucity of television sets in Chinese homes at the time.
It wasn’t until the following year, when Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up led to an explosion in the number of television sets, that the gala grabbed hold of national consciousness. Most recall the 1979 broadcast as their first experience watching the gala, which from then on would become a yearly tradition.
Videotaped in advance, the event made bold leaps that would become entrenched in subsequent years; there was, for instance, the monumental decision to open the show with a dance routine rather than a series of turgid political slogans. It also defined what would become the nature of the gala by bringing the audience closer to the stage, creating an intimacy as if they were taking part in a tea party.
But despite these improvements, the first few shows, which were all prerecorded and broadcast nationwide on New Year’s Eve, largely failed to impress. Too staid, the audience said; too much politicking, they complained.
This was the history that was hanging over Huang’s head as he organized a flurry of meetings with TV executives in an attempt to bring the 1983 show to life. During one such meeting, a coworker proposed inviting the TV audience to participate by phoning in requests for their favorite songs. By degrees, this innovative notion of interaction was expanded, leading to the landmark decision to broadcast the whole show live.
This meant a whole new level of excitement—and danger. Anything could happen on a live broadcast, and if it wasn’t to the liking of the audience (or, more importantly, the authorities), there would be no do-overs.
“There were political risks one took to host a gala,” Huang later said in an interview with Tencent News. “Each time I made decisions it was like crossing a river by feeling the stones.” One of the controversial decisions he made was to appoint crosstalk actors as the gala hosts. Though it may seem an innocuous move now, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, entertainment was still expected to be instructive rather than—well, entertaining. The worry was the crosstalk actors would be too vulgar for China’s still fragile sense of decency. But Huang knew a live show would require hosts who could think on their feet and enliven the atmosphere with improvised jokes and asides, a skill that crosstalk actors have in spades.
Yet even the best laid plans have a tendency to go awry. As soon as the show opened, the hotlines were inundated with requests for the song “Love for My Hometown” (《乡恋》Xi`ngli3n), which had previously been banned for containing “personal sentiments” that were thought to be too decadent for the society of the time. The studio executives chewed their thumbs and ignored the requests. But the audience kept calling, eventually forcing the then-Minister of Broadcasts, Radio and Television, who was in charge of the evening, to throw out the rulebook and broadcast the banned song.
The chaos in the studio stood in marked contrast to the eerie quiet that had settled on the winter streets outside. “Before the show started, firecrackers could be heard exploding everywhere in the city, but they gradually subsided and did not start up again until the end of the show,” Huang recalled in an interview with Beijing Times.“It felt as if every family was riveted to the TV, watching the gala.”
Fast forward to the present and the gala has installed itself as a holiday fixture in Chinese homes, alongside other traditions like reunion dinners and playing with fireworks. “As big a country as China is, it suddenly feels remarkably small when Spring Festival arrives, as if every family is watching the same channel at the same time,” says Afra, a Beijing-based reporter with Singapore’s The United Morning Post.
“the Waterloo epiSode”
over the last nearly 30 years, CCTV claims the gala has consistently drawn the most viewers of any show broadcast at home or abroad on the Chinese New Year’s Eve. It is a remarkable feat, and Huang attained near-hero status in China for his initial success. But in 1985 the ambitious director overreached to catastrophic effect. In attempting to host the gala in an outdoor stadium, Huang overlooked the limited resources he had at his disposal. It was a disaster. Audience members could barely make out the faces of the performers and the subtitles were out of sync. Even before the show had finished, furious audience members were dialing CCTV to criticize the station. The discontent grew to such an extent that the then-Vice Minister of Broadcasts, Radio and TV was greeted the next morning by everyone he met with the same question “What the hell kind of gala did you just hold?”
In the following week, sacks of complaint letters landed on CCTV’s doorstep, and the incident was branded “The Waterloo Episode” in a caustic comparison with Napoleon’s epic defeat of the English navy. The brouhaha culminated in CCTV taking the unprecedented step of issuing an official apology on its daily news broadcast, and the authorities launching an investigation into the causes of the failure.
a Stage For oVernight SucceSS
the gala also retains an established reputation for catapulting unknown performers from obscurity to super stardom almost overnight. Before the 1987 gala, Taiwan-born singer Kris Phillips (费翔F-I Xi1ng) was a nobody, his unsold albums lining the back shelves of record stores across the country. Yet his rendition of the song “A Torch of Fire in Winter” (《冬天里的一把火》D4ngti`n L@ de Y# B2 Hu6) during that year’s gala instantly transformed him into a household name. The song’s chorus, “You’re just like a torch of fire in winter, whose flames warm my heart”(你就像那冬天里的一把火，熊熊火光温暖了我N@ ji&xi3ng n3 d4ngti`n l@ de y# b2 hu6, xi5ngxi5ng hu6gu`ng w8nnu2nle w6) caught the public’s imagination and drove
Phillip’s album to sell 1.6 million copies. The song was so popular that a bemused Phillips was even blamed for a wildfire that caught in the forests of northeast China shortly after that year’s Spring Festival.
The example of Phillips and others like him inspired a train of wannabe stars to journey to Beijing and petition for a place on the show. Zhao Benshan (赵本山), renowned as the “King of Skit,” is now a gala fixture, having appeared on every show bar one since his debut in 1990. The dongbei native and his dark blue Maoist-era suit(中山装 zh4ngsh`nzhu`ng) instantly won over nationwide audiences with skits taking off rural customs and speech, and punchlines that became public catchphrases overnight.
But it took a degree of perseverance for Zhao to get his start on the show. At his first attempt in 1987, Zhao was encouraged by crosstalk actor and 1983 gala host Jiang Kun to set out for Beijing on a mission to transform his local notoriety into national fame. His suitcase was loaded with videotapes of his performances, as well as a canny secret weapon—10 bottles of Maotai Chinese liquor, with which he intended to bribe gala directors for his shot at fame. But the rustic Zhao didn’t even make it past the front door, let alone get a chance to ply decision-makers with expensive bottles of liquor. Frustrated, he spent the remainder of his time in the capital cooped up in a hotel, polishing off one bottle of Maotai a day. When the last drop was finished, he returned home, but still managed to get his troupe to reimburse him by claiming he had dished out all the bottles as bribes. How’s that for chutzpah? It was a humbling experience, and a far cry from Zhao’s current position as one of the show’s major draws.
Yang Xue, a 26-year-old woman from Jilin Province, recalls that her family used to eat dumplings around midnight on New Year’s Eve in keeping with tradition in northern China. But in recent years, they’ve polished off the dumplings ahead of time to ensure they’re ready for Zhao’s skit, which usually takes place just before midnight at the end of the four-hour show.
Yang’s family is by no means unique in having centuries-old traditions altered by the advent of the gala. Mr. Zhu, a Shanghai native in his fifties, recalls that his pre-TV New Year’s Eve ritual involved offering sacrifices to the ancestors and performing a kowtow ceremony, before gathering the whole family for a reunion dinner. After the meal, the younger kids would spend most of the night outside lighting firecrackers and playing with peers (though hopefully not at the same time), while their elder siblings helped parents prepare more food: steaming buns and rice cakes, stir-frying peanuts, sunflower seeds and pine nuts, as well as making meat balls and dumplings.
Yet even Zhu reserves his nostalgia for the days when neighbors would sit together to watch the gala on a black and white TV set. “There were few choices of TV channels and programs in the 1980s. Unlike today’s pop stars who frequently hold individual concerts, the gala was a once-a-year opportunity for us to see a whole range of stars all at the same time.”
a Summary oF the year
The gala strives not only to showcase the talent of the moment, but also to serve up lighthearted references to the key events of the preceding year. In 1998, the blockbuster movie “Titanic” wowed audiences at Chinese movie theaters, capturing the heart of millions at a stroke and prompting a curious piece of stagecraft from the directors of the 1999 gala. In the skit “The Experienced Takes the Lead” (《老将出马》L2oji3ng Ch$m2), Chinese actors re-enacted the classic scene in which Rose stretches out her arms and falls back into Jack’s embrace. However, in a playful attempt to introduce some Chinese characteristics to the scene, the directors replaced the iconic ship’s deck with a large orange tractor.
The parody of “Titanic” is just one instance of the gala playing out sketches that parallel current cultural phenomena. In 1999, the huge popularity of the TV drama “Princess Huanzhu” (《还珠格格》Hu1nzh$ G9ge)—a comedy about an unruly adopted daughter of Qing Dynasty(1616-1911) Emperor Qianlong—earned the female lead “Little Swallow” (小燕子xi2oy3nzi) a role as one of the gala hosts, while another actress in the drama also appeared on stage in a sketch.
diminiShing popularity
While the gala focuses on light pop culture, a show rarely unfolds without at least a passing nod toward important political and social events. In 2009, the directors were faced with a particularly sticky conundrum, as the previous year had proved a momentous one in good ways and bad, encompassing the tragic Sichuan Earthquake, the Beijing Olympic Games and the successful launch of the Shenzhou 7 Manned Space Mission, not to mention the onset of the global financial crisis. This smorgasbord of key events provided rich source material for the writers and choreographers, and the show featured appearances from astronauts, Olympic champions and “Cola Boy,” made famous by asking for a cold bottle of Coke the moment he was rescued after being buried in debris for 80 hours following the Wenchuan quake.
But the format drew sharp criticism from some corners for leaning too heavily toward a political agenda. The complaints brought into relief an ongoing argument over the true popularity of the gala, especially with younger generations. A well-known joke illustrates the debate: a Chinese guy registers an account on a matchmaker website in search of a marriage partner. One day, he is surprised to find that all the girls who have shown interest have deleted him from their friend lists. He inspects his profile carefully and finds out that someone has secretly logged into his account and changed his “hobbies”to include “watching the CCTV Spring Festival gala and walking with caged birds” (a common hobby among old Chinese men).
Xiao Shufeng, a woman in her thirties from Shandong Province, hasn’t watched the gala for three years. “Boring,” is her immediate response when asked for her opinion on the show. “Every year it’s the same old faces. The skits are stale and superficial, always following an inflexible model of trying to be amusing while sprinkling in sentimental elements. I felt like I was watching a CCTV News broadcast instead of an entertainment program,” she said.
However, some of those who agree with Xiao still can’t tear themselves away. “Though the gala is boring, I’ll still watch it,” writes one blogger, “otherwise I’d be hopelessly ‘out’ the next day when everyone starts criticizing it on the internet.”
Even creator Huang Yihe has conceded that the proliferation of Chinese entertainment shows has chipped away at the gala’s reputation, with many younger viewers now having more fun criticizing it online than actually watching the performance.
Conversely, overseas Chinese represent an increasingly loyal audience. For Mr. Guan, who emigrated from China to the US city of Philadelphia, the show’s appeal lies in its evocation of his hometown, family and traditional Spring Festival celebrations. “It doesn’t matter whether the gala itself is engaging,”Guan says. “What matters is that the whole family sits around the dinner table and enjoys the rare occasion of a reunion with the TV on.”
pretender to the throne
many viewers, loyal a f i c i o n a d o s o r otherwise, will pass the time in the run-up to gala night by guessing which stars will make an appearance, while the director does his or her level best to keep the contents of the show under wraps. However, last year’s show was groundbreaking in that three of the slots were made public in advance. These were filled by the three finalists of the reality TV show “I Want to Perform in the Spring Gala” (《我要上春晚》W6 Y3o Sh3ng Ch$nw2n), which follows grassroots artists as they compete to appear in the gala.
After just one full year on air, the reality show already threatens to eclipse the gala itself in terms of popularity. Last year’s winners, consisting of a street performance duo, a female singer plucked from the underpasses of Beijing and a group of street-dancing migrant workers from Shenzhen, were by far the most popular of the debut acts in the 2011 gala. Mrs. He, a Beijing native in her fifties, is unequivocal over which show gets her vote: “I love to watch ‘I Want to Perform in the Spring Gala’, but not the real Spring Gala.” Yet despite audiences’ preference for the reality show over its esteemed predecessor, the two enjoy a symbiotic relationship, one which organizers hope will, for the time being, deflect attention from the gala’s perceived shortcomings.
It was a snowy day in the November of 1982, and Huang’s boss had just instructed him to organize a TV gala for the upcoming Spring Festival, a task that would make or break his career. It was just a few years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the growing popularity of televisions, along with a sharp public hunger for entertainment—which had been left languishing through the last decade—meant that Huang was on the brink of either a monumental breakthrough or a humiliating failure. Thankfully, Huang wouldn’t have to completely invent the wheel. Back in 1956, China’s Central News Documentary Film Studio had forged a rough blueprint with their film“Grand Get-together at Spring Festival,” which celebrated the year’s end with a motley group of entertainers, literary figures, military officials, businessmen and scientists.
This provided a template for later shows to follow, but it was not until China emerged from the televisual doldrums of the Cultural Revolution that a similar format saw the light of day. The 1978 broadcast of CCTV’s “Gala to Welcome the New Year” marked the beginning of the show’s modern evolution. While it pioneered the integration of old and new forms of entertainment—storytelling, crosstalk, Peking Opera, singing and dancing—the show only reached a limited audience due to the paucity of television sets in Chinese homes at the time.
It wasn’t until the following year, when Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up led to an explosion in the number of television sets, that the gala grabbed hold of national consciousness. Most recall the 1979 broadcast as their first experience watching the gala, which from then on would become a yearly tradition.
Videotaped in advance, the event made bold leaps that would become entrenched in subsequent years; there was, for instance, the monumental decision to open the show with a dance routine rather than a series of turgid political slogans. It also defined what would become the nature of the gala by bringing the audience closer to the stage, creating an intimacy as if they were taking part in a tea party.
But despite these improvements, the first few shows, which were all prerecorded and broadcast nationwide on New Year’s Eve, largely failed to impress. Too staid, the audience said; too much politicking, they complained.
This was the history that was hanging over Huang’s head as he organized a flurry of meetings with TV executives in an attempt to bring the 1983 show to life. During one such meeting, a coworker proposed inviting the TV audience to participate by phoning in requests for their favorite songs. By degrees, this innovative notion of interaction was expanded, leading to the landmark decision to broadcast the whole show live.
This meant a whole new level of excitement—and danger. Anything could happen on a live broadcast, and if it wasn’t to the liking of the audience (or, more importantly, the authorities), there would be no do-overs.
“There were political risks one took to host a gala,” Huang later said in an interview with Tencent News. “Each time I made decisions it was like crossing a river by feeling the stones.” One of the controversial decisions he made was to appoint crosstalk actors as the gala hosts. Though it may seem an innocuous move now, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, entertainment was still expected to be instructive rather than—well, entertaining. The worry was the crosstalk actors would be too vulgar for China’s still fragile sense of decency. But Huang knew a live show would require hosts who could think on their feet and enliven the atmosphere with improvised jokes and asides, a skill that crosstalk actors have in spades.
Yet even the best laid plans have a tendency to go awry. As soon as the show opened, the hotlines were inundated with requests for the song “Love for My Hometown” (《乡恋》Xi`ngli3n), which had previously been banned for containing “personal sentiments” that were thought to be too decadent for the society of the time. The studio executives chewed their thumbs and ignored the requests. But the audience kept calling, eventually forcing the then-Minister of Broadcasts, Radio and Television, who was in charge of the evening, to throw out the rulebook and broadcast the banned song.
The chaos in the studio stood in marked contrast to the eerie quiet that had settled on the winter streets outside. “Before the show started, firecrackers could be heard exploding everywhere in the city, but they gradually subsided and did not start up again until the end of the show,” Huang recalled in an interview with Beijing Times.“It felt as if every family was riveted to the TV, watching the gala.”
Fast forward to the present and the gala has installed itself as a holiday fixture in Chinese homes, alongside other traditions like reunion dinners and playing with fireworks. “As big a country as China is, it suddenly feels remarkably small when Spring Festival arrives, as if every family is watching the same channel at the same time,” says Afra, a Beijing-based reporter with Singapore’s The United Morning Post.
“the Waterloo epiSode”
over the last nearly 30 years, CCTV claims the gala has consistently drawn the most viewers of any show broadcast at home or abroad on the Chinese New Year’s Eve. It is a remarkable feat, and Huang attained near-hero status in China for his initial success. But in 1985 the ambitious director overreached to catastrophic effect. In attempting to host the gala in an outdoor stadium, Huang overlooked the limited resources he had at his disposal. It was a disaster. Audience members could barely make out the faces of the performers and the subtitles were out of sync. Even before the show had finished, furious audience members were dialing CCTV to criticize the station. The discontent grew to such an extent that the then-Vice Minister of Broadcasts, Radio and TV was greeted the next morning by everyone he met with the same question “What the hell kind of gala did you just hold?”
In the following week, sacks of complaint letters landed on CCTV’s doorstep, and the incident was branded “The Waterloo Episode” in a caustic comparison with Napoleon’s epic defeat of the English navy. The brouhaha culminated in CCTV taking the unprecedented step of issuing an official apology on its daily news broadcast, and the authorities launching an investigation into the causes of the failure.
a Stage For oVernight SucceSS
the gala also retains an established reputation for catapulting unknown performers from obscurity to super stardom almost overnight. Before the 1987 gala, Taiwan-born singer Kris Phillips (费翔F-I Xi1ng) was a nobody, his unsold albums lining the back shelves of record stores across the country. Yet his rendition of the song “A Torch of Fire in Winter” (《冬天里的一把火》D4ngti`n L@ de Y# B2 Hu6) during that year’s gala instantly transformed him into a household name. The song’s chorus, “You’re just like a torch of fire in winter, whose flames warm my heart”(你就像那冬天里的一把火，熊熊火光温暖了我N@ ji&xi3ng n3 d4ngti`n l@ de y# b2 hu6, xi5ngxi5ng hu6gu`ng w8nnu2nle w6) caught the public’s imagination and drove
Phillip’s album to sell 1.6 million copies. The song was so popular that a bemused Phillips was even blamed for a wildfire that caught in the forests of northeast China shortly after that year’s Spring Festival.
The example of Phillips and others like him inspired a train of wannabe stars to journey to Beijing and petition for a place on the show. Zhao Benshan (赵本山), renowned as the “King of Skit,” is now a gala fixture, having appeared on every show bar one since his debut in 1990. The dongbei native and his dark blue Maoist-era suit(中山装 zh4ngsh`nzhu`ng) instantly won over nationwide audiences with skits taking off rural customs and speech, and punchlines that became public catchphrases overnight.
But it took a degree of perseverance for Zhao to get his start on the show. At his first attempt in 1987, Zhao was encouraged by crosstalk actor and 1983 gala host Jiang Kun to set out for Beijing on a mission to transform his local notoriety into national fame. His suitcase was loaded with videotapes of his performances, as well as a canny secret weapon—10 bottles of Maotai Chinese liquor, with which he intended to bribe gala directors for his shot at fame. But the rustic Zhao didn’t even make it past the front door, let alone get a chance to ply decision-makers with expensive bottles of liquor. Frustrated, he spent the remainder of his time in the capital cooped up in a hotel, polishing off one bottle of Maotai a day. When the last drop was finished, he returned home, but still managed to get his troupe to reimburse him by claiming he had dished out all the bottles as bribes. How’s that for chutzpah? It was a humbling experience, and a far cry from Zhao’s current position as one of the show’s major draws.
Yang Xue, a 26-year-old woman from Jilin Province, recalls that her family used to eat dumplings around midnight on New Year’s Eve in keeping with tradition in northern China. But in recent years, they’ve polished off the dumplings ahead of time to ensure they’re ready for Zhao’s skit, which usually takes place just before midnight at the end of the four-hour show.
Yang’s family is by no means unique in having centuries-old traditions altered by the advent of the gala. Mr. Zhu, a Shanghai native in his fifties, recalls that his pre-TV New Year’s Eve ritual involved offering sacrifices to the ancestors and performing a kowtow ceremony, before gathering the whole family for a reunion dinner. After the meal, the younger kids would spend most of the night outside lighting firecrackers and playing with peers (though hopefully not at the same time), while their elder siblings helped parents prepare more food: steaming buns and rice cakes, stir-frying peanuts, sunflower seeds and pine nuts, as well as making meat balls and dumplings.
Yet even Zhu reserves his nostalgia for the days when neighbors would sit together to watch the gala on a black and white TV set. “There were few choices of TV channels and programs in the 1980s. Unlike today’s pop stars who frequently hold individual concerts, the gala was a once-a-year opportunity for us to see a whole range of stars all at the same time.”
a Summary oF the year
The gala strives not only to showcase the talent of the moment, but also to serve up lighthearted references to the key events of the preceding year. In 1998, the blockbuster movie “Titanic” wowed audiences at Chinese movie theaters, capturing the heart of millions at a stroke and prompting a curious piece of stagecraft from the directors of the 1999 gala. In the skit “The Experienced Takes the Lead” (《老将出马》L2oji3ng Ch$m2), Chinese actors re-enacted the classic scene in which Rose stretches out her arms and falls back into Jack’s embrace. However, in a playful attempt to introduce some Chinese characteristics to the scene, the directors replaced the iconic ship’s deck with a large orange tractor.
The parody of “Titanic” is just one instance of the gala playing out sketches that parallel current cultural phenomena. In 1999, the huge popularity of the TV drama “Princess Huanzhu” (《还珠格格》Hu1nzh$ G9ge)—a comedy about an unruly adopted daughter of Qing Dynasty(1616-1911) Emperor Qianlong—earned the female lead “Little Swallow” (小燕子xi2oy3nzi) a role as one of the gala hosts, while another actress in the drama also appeared on stage in a sketch.
diminiShing popularity
While the gala focuses on light pop culture, a show rarely unfolds without at least a passing nod toward important political and social events. In 2009, the directors were faced with a particularly sticky conundrum, as the previous year had proved a momentous one in good ways and bad, encompassing the tragic Sichuan Earthquake, the Beijing Olympic Games and the successful launch of the Shenzhou 7 Manned Space Mission, not to mention the onset of the global financial crisis. This smorgasbord of key events provided rich source material for the writers and choreographers, and the show featured appearances from astronauts, Olympic champions and “Cola Boy,” made famous by asking for a cold bottle of Coke the moment he was rescued after being buried in debris for 80 hours following the Wenchuan quake.
But the format drew sharp criticism from some corners for leaning too heavily toward a political agenda. The complaints brought into relief an ongoing argument over the true popularity of the gala, especially with younger generations. A well-known joke illustrates the debate: a Chinese guy registers an account on a matchmaker website in search of a marriage partner. One day, he is surprised to find that all the girls who have shown interest have deleted him from their friend lists. He inspects his profile carefully and finds out that someone has secretly logged into his account and changed his “hobbies”to include “watching the CCTV Spring Festival gala and walking with caged birds” (a common hobby among old Chinese men).
Xiao Shufeng, a woman in her thirties from Shandong Province, hasn’t watched the gala for three years. “Boring,” is her immediate response when asked for her opinion on the show. “Every year it’s the same old faces. The skits are stale and superficial, always following an inflexible model of trying to be amusing while sprinkling in sentimental elements. I felt like I was watching a CCTV News broadcast instead of an entertainment program,” she said.
However, some of those who agree with Xiao still can’t tear themselves away. “Though the gala is boring, I’ll still watch it,” writes one blogger, “otherwise I’d be hopelessly ‘out’ the next day when everyone starts criticizing it on the internet.”
Even creator Huang Yihe has conceded that the proliferation of Chinese entertainment shows has chipped away at the gala’s reputation, with many younger viewers now having more fun criticizing it online than actually watching the performance.
Conversely, overseas Chinese represent an increasingly loyal audience. For Mr. Guan, who emigrated from China to the US city of Philadelphia, the show’s appeal lies in its evocation of his hometown, family and traditional Spring Festival celebrations. “It doesn’t matter whether the gala itself is engaging,”Guan says. “What matters is that the whole family sits around the dinner table and enjoys the rare occasion of a reunion with the TV on.”
pretender to the throne
many viewers, loyal a f i c i o n a d o s o r otherwise, will pass the time in the run-up to gala night by guessing which stars will make an appearance, while the director does his or her level best to keep the contents of the show under wraps. However, last year’s show was groundbreaking in that three of the slots were made public in advance. These were filled by the three finalists of the reality TV show “I Want to Perform in the Spring Gala” (《我要上春晚》W6 Y3o Sh3ng Ch$nw2n), which follows grassroots artists as they compete to appear in the gala.
After just one full year on air, the reality show already threatens to eclipse the gala itself in terms of popularity. Last year’s winners, consisting of a street performance duo, a female singer plucked from the underpasses of Beijing and a group of street-dancing migrant workers from Shenzhen, were by far the most popular of the debut acts in the 2011 gala. Mrs. He, a Beijing native in her fifties, is unequivocal over which show gets her vote: “I love to watch ‘I Want to Perform in the Spring Gala’, but not the real Spring Gala.” Yet despite audiences’ preference for the reality show over its esteemed predecessor, the two enjoy a symbiotic relationship, one which organizers hope will, for the time being, deflect attention from the gala’s perceived shortcomings.