The prologue to this story begins on the balmy beaches of Goa, southwest India, when I was about 7 months into a one year trip around the world. There, I bought a “travel guitar” and began earning a keep as a musician by playing and singing easy listening classics in tourist bars and restaurants in exchange for beer and food. Since my music had been quite well received, and I had always wanted to be a rock star, I resolved to continue on this career path, and hopefully, start getting paid more than fish and beer.
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| Singing for fish and beer with my brother Lachlan (right) in Goa, 2006 |
Go East, Young Man
After nearly 4 months in India, I decided that it was time to head east again, and I flew out of New Delhi for China in early March 2006. Starting in Beijing and working my way south, I continued on my path towards “stardom”, by visiting my contacts around the country and attempting to peddle my travelling musician wares around various bars as I went.
I didn't know it at the time, but destiny had set my rock star trajectory on a collision course for Jiangsu Television and their weekend variety show, “非常周末” (Feichang Zhoumo – Extremely Weekend).
I got the gig somewhat by chance when I was visiting my friend Adam-Paul Smolak (a.k.a. AP), an American businessman who was at the time CEO of an on-line, English learning, “edu-tainment” company called “Enjoyabc.com”.
AP and I met in Yunnan Province during an earlier trip to China in 2001. He had set up shop in Nanjing in 2003, and had worked hard at establishing his 关系(guanxi - connections) around town, so it was with envy that I watched his recent TV appearance on the Jiangsu Television talk show Small Talk as “CEO of the week”. AP assured me that getting on TV around here was easy, and true to his word, two days later he'd been asked to appear on a weekend variety show on the very same network.
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| Me (far left) with AP (second from right) in Yunnan, 2001 |
The gig was for a foreigner who spoke a bit of Chinese to participate in a matchmaking game (one girl, two local lads, and a hapless foreigner) that was to be one segment of the show. AP wasn't really interested, and nor did he have the time, so he called out to me from his office, “Hey Benson, you said you wanted to be on TV, right?”. The rest was history.
Comic Relief
The next day I met with the producer of the show, and my travel guitar found a use for itself again - I was to be pitched on the show as a travelling musician and sing a Chinese song to try to “woo” the beauty. On arrival at the TV station, I was ushered backstage and greeted by a scene of busy make-up artists and some rather attractive lasses practicing their dance moves. We were briefed on the format of the show, which was best described as semi-live and semi-scripted, and it quickly became clear that I was to be the comic relief.
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| The scruffy traveller as comic relief |
The two other guys were given trendy shirts to wear, while I was left in my scruffy travel clothes (they did, however, put me through the make-up production line, which I thought made me look like a zombie, but apparently turns out well under lights).
After this I was made to wait backstage for several hours while they filmed the other parts of the show (we were last, and the audience was live), so I nervously strummed my guitar and tried to memorize the words to “对面的女孩儿看过来“ (Dui mian de nü hai kan guo lai – which translates roughly as “Girl over there, look over here”), and the rest of the Chinese punch lines that we'd agreed on, while sweating my make-up off.
The basic plot followed that of most dating shows – the girl, looking for “Mr Right”, would ask us some tough questions and put us through a few “tests”, in order to determine which of us was worthy of taking her out on a date. During the first “test”, we had to see how many needles we could thread while being distracted by a couple of dancing “辣妹” (lamei - "hottie" - hey, that's the term I was told to use!), which, to my delight, turned out to be the above-mentioned attractive lasses.
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| Getting down with the "hotties" on semi-live TV |
The Eye of the Needle
I was instructed to give up on the needles and start dancing with the girls. To make up for this mishap, of course, I then had to offer to sing a song to the girl to try and win her heart, and my guitar magically appeared from offstage – cue the Chinese love song.
When show time came and the lights went up, my Mandarin was hopelessly inadequate. I couldn't follow the flow of the show at all and often just had to hope that I was nodding and smiling at the right time. What's more, my song lyrics came out all wrong, and when I was given a chance to speak, I stumbled over my sentences. Thankfully, they had a skillful editor, and I think I came off quite well in the final product.
After a few more elimination rounds, I was part of another pre-scripted gag where, in a Chinese play on words, I deliberately wrote the wrong (but identical-sounding) characters when we were asked to write the names of the four city gates of Nanjing (们 – plural for people, vs 门 - gate, both pronounced "men"). Simple stuff, but the Chinese audience seemed to love watching this “foreign comedian” sing, dance, and write Chinese in child-like handwriting.
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| They're both pronounced "men" - get it? |
Did I get the girl you ask? Alas no; that was scripted too. Not that I was overly upset. There wasn't even a dinner-for-two prize on offer for the winner. More to the point, I got the girl's phone number anyway! And so it was with much satisfaction that I collected my first paycheck in China – 200 Yuan and a free dinner for 8 hours' work (albeit mostly sitting around backstage practising guitar). It's a long road to the top, but you have to start somewhere, right?
To see my appearance on the show, visit my Youtube channel.
To read more about my failed attempts at Chinese rock stardom, see my post "Almost Famous: The hardest working man in Nanjing show business".
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