Heavy in the Game Show

Changsha, with a population pushing that of London, is small fry when compared to China’s five great cities. No matter that high rise buildings are sprouting up like mushrooms after rain or that, in any one portion of the horizon, you will see around seven cranes, Changsha is comparatively titchy. Although it can’t complete with the big boys like Tianjin, Wuhan or Guangzhou (nope, I’d never heard of them either), it does has some strings to its economic bow. Changsha is known not only for being a centre of the textile industry and a ‘party town’ with a good night life, but also as an “important creative centre for TV and entertainment arts”. And what could be more important or creative than that jewel of TV broadcasting the ‘game show’? Well, dear followers, while this blog may have a readership of roughly three- myself included - I have now made a tit of myself in an obstacle course on national television in a country of over 1.3 billion people.
 
After a fairly exhausting morning teaching the kids to make rattles from plastic cups with a mild hangover from the several large bottles of beer I’d felt obliged to drink the night before, every single foreign intern was ushered into a bus and driven to a mystery studio somewhere deep in the heart of suburban Changsha. I say suburban; it was surrounded on all sides by 30-storey apartments, and I could count at least eleven cranes. China, while economically well ahead of almost everyone else, is a world leader neither in their sophistication nor their attitude to health and safety.  We were greeted with the sight of a pretty but obviously heavily polluted and schistosomiasis-infected lake filled with garish, kitsch, automated death traps or ‘obstacles’. Oddly-dressed, obnoxious presenters bounced around the main stage screaming Chinese catch phrases, while equally obnoxious-looking celebrity contestants bounced through the obstacles and were hurled with great force into the murky bilharzia-ridden waters below.
 
The course consisted of six herculean hurdles, each one probably in violation of several international health and safety laws.  The ‘foreign teachers’ were divided into four teams each with a name subtler and wittier than the last; Dramarama, “Dancing Queens”, Babestation (translated as “Horny Girls”)  and my own team “Boys with Toys” (translated as “Dirty, slutty Boys”). After being asked to scream a catchphrase, perform a humiliating dance, in my case “Who let the dogs out”, followed by the YMCA, we were balanced on a surfboard and hurled very fast down a very steep slope towards a very slippery inflatable platform. Those of us who landed on the platform and scrambled onto the first island had to swing, Tarzan-style, from a sopping wet rope suspended from a crane onto the next island. On the next island were three large polystyrene ‘prizes’, which we had to carry across four rapidly-rotating platforms before jumping onto another inflatable mat. If you got that far, you had to cross two massive fast-spinning windmills, jump across four unhinged freely-rotating beach balls and finally climb a climbing wall on a treadmill while being pelted with water. Out of the >30 contestants who were filmed over the few hours we were there, only one guy managed to get to the end, where he was greeted by a not obviously attractive but nonetheless not awful looking western girl and her entourage of brightly dressed muscley Chinese men to receive a shiny new top range television.
 
When my own turn came, fresh from the most embarrassing performance of the YMCA I have done all week- there have been a lot- I was loaded onto the surfboard of death, screamed “for queen and country” and was hurled headfirst onto the slippery rubber mattress below. Having caught my breath I jumped onto the rope swing and, instead of flinging myself into the abyss and beyond, hopped lightly off the platform and landed gently on the next. I almost forgot to grab a polystyrene prize but remembered just in time and picked up a token for a £100 air conditioner. I hopped from the first to the second to the third spinning platform but, here, my luck ran out. I put my foot on the boundary between the last two spinning plan forms and was hurled quite literally heals over head into the air. I landed hard, first, on the edge of one of the platforms and then into the foul tasting murky water below. My plan had been to play dead as a joke until someone came to fish me out, but I was jolted into action by the mouthful of rank water coupled with the terrible pain in my backside as well as a deep seated fear of vector borne parasites that only several terms of lectures from the worm fetishist Professor Nick Mascie Taylor can instil.
 
My bottom still hurts and I’m fairly sure S. japonicum cercaria are currently morphing into schistosomulum and preparing to migrate to my liver where they will produce god knows how many thousand necrosis inducing eggs per day. On the plus side, however, before I was flung into the water I apparently made the first two obstacles look effortless, I very nearly won an air-conditioneder and I can now say that I’m “big in China”, so I guess every cloud has a silver lining.