Corrupt police, lavish-living MPs and doctors who treat patients according to the size of their wallets, are all fodder for Our Russia, a sketch show that pushes the limits of Russian television.
The popular program has become a rare example in Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s country of television comedy being used to comment on contemporary social ills or even criticize the authorities.
“You could say it was based on personal experience, if that’s what you call living in Russia,” said Semyon Slepakov, one of the script writers, who is also a stand-up comedian.
Photo: AFP
The show started out in 2006 as a localized version of Little Britain, the cult British series with characters such as a man who proclaims himself the “only gay in the village.”
The Russian show took the idea of characters coming from all over the country, but has a different focus on confronting social ills, Slepakov said.
“We liked the idea that we could talk about the people who live in our country, but we talk about them in a very different way. We have a lot of social satire, when we harshly mock some social phenomenon,” Slepakov said.
The show runs on TNT, a youth entertainment channel that is owned by natural gas giant Gazprom’s media arm, and has strongly pushed comedy formats, while it does not have any current affairs shows.
The sketches pull few punches.
In the latest season, a tough-talking city police chief turns wimp when he hears that the mayor’s son mowed down a woman in his yellow Lamborghini, deciding immediately that it must have been the pedestrian’s fault.
“The old dear was ill and on mind-altering drugs,” he says.
This sketch takes place in a town with a made-up name because the makers could have got in trouble by apparently referring to real officials, Slepakov said.
“It’s a made-up town called Ust-Kuzminsk. There isn’t such a town because if it was a real town, we would be talking about specific people,” he said.
Despite this precaution, the sketch is reminiscent of numerous real-life cases.
In 2005, the son of deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov drove into and killed an elderly woman on a pedestrian crossing. Investigators ruled he was not speeding and he was never charged. Scriptwriter Slepakov stressed that its targets for criticism are in line with the government’s policies.
“What we are doing in no sense goes against what our authorities are saying. After all they are fighting corruption, aren’t they?” he said. “They say our police is in a bad state. We also think so and show policemen like that. It’s not that we react to some statements by our leaders, it’s what everyone knows.”
Some topics are straight off the presses. Just last week, Putin berated governors for patients’ having to pay for medical care and for the lack of basic equipment and long lines in hospitals.
In this season’s Our Russia, a hospital doctor neglects a patient who is getting treatment funded by the state and waits hand-and-foot on another in the same ward who is paying directly for treatment.
This is commonplace in Russian hospitals, Slepakov said, although in reality the patients would be segregated in separate wards.
Russian television in the 1990s directly mocked politicians, right up to former Russian president -Boris Yeltsin, in its Kukly or Puppets show.
However, as television came under much tighter state control in the Putin era, such examples of daring satire became few and far between.
“If you are general and talk in terms of types, you can say what you like, while Kukly is based on naming names” said Peter Pomerantsev, who worked as a producer for Russian broadcasters including TNT for four years.
He called the latest hit-and-run sketch “very close to the wind” because of its associations with the Ivanov case, but added that “these seem to be the rules of the game.”
As a top-rated youth channel, TNT gets some leeway and its socially oriented comedy is not scrutinized in the same way as it would be on the heavy-weight channels, he said.
“It’s entertainment. It serves a different purpose on the ideological spectrum, to keep the country upbeat and happy,” he said.
Comedy is changing, Slepakov said, with political satire less of a priority than in the 1990s.
“When the Soviet Union fell apart, people started saying what they could not before and since they had a lot stored up, they gave a huge vent to all this satire,” he said. “Now [comedy] is going in lots of directions and satire is only one of them.”
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