Saturday 18th November 2000
Nuffin the Hamster reports on an entertainment industry award for Election 2000
FLORIDA (Thursday) - With the Presidential Election showing
no signs of coming to a swift and final conclusion, the entertainment media are
already heralding the event as a major coop for prime time TV and nominating
characters involved for future Oscars and Grammies. So successful has the
television series been that teeshirts have already been printed and are selling
on the streets for double the price they would be if advertising 'Friends' or
'3rd Rock'.
Cast in his role as 'Devil's Advocate', Al Gore is
already the man they all love to hate in homes throughout the US and beyond who,
even when the law seems cut and dried, develops litigation based on laws which
no one has ever heard of.
'It was a stroke of genius' a script writer told
us as we spoke over a short break of coffee and biscuits before filming was to
begin on Saturday's developments 'The character of Gore was necessary to make
the electoral process be strung out as long as it could be - otherwise, the
election sitcom would have been over in a matter of hours. What was fundamental
to both major characters, though, was to represent them as mere puppets of the
beast of a judicial process which we could pan out to run as long as we wanted.
Why, these are so much like marionettes that you can virtually see the strings
like you can in Thunderbirds'
Ratings have already hit the roof, pierced the slates and
are going on to be visible to the International Space Station, CNN reporting
that, even through the more mundane programs that bear no information about the
campaign, viewers are already tuning in in case there's a dramatic development
which would cause them to cut the program and cross live to Florida for an
update.
'We're already thinking of running this 24 hours
over the weekend' a network director told us 'and stuff the other programs.
We're already experimenting with digital representations of both Gore and Bush
so that we can dispense with them having to remain awake throughout the entire
time "on air". But the success will largely be dependent on the success of the
script writers coming up with more obscure laws which, although they have no
relevance to the accuracy of the Florida count, will be irrelevantly applied to
the process'
Crowds have already roared at the 'pregnant chad'
which hit the news a couple of days ago, the invention of George Bernie one of
the script advisors.
'It came like a flash of inspiration' he told
reporters 'It just seemed to me that we could detract from the relevance of the
original count by deflecting the main characters into side issues and use sexual
language to increase the viewer ratings'
This is exactly what happened. Misunderstanding what a
'pregnant chad' was, many tuned in trying to find out which candidate had made
Chad pregnant and how this would virtually guarantee them success if elected -
judging by the events surrounding the current holder of the office. Figures just
released show a 45% increase in expected viewers for the incident, something
which is currently being returned to and developed.
'We have a few ideas in the pipeline' a source
close to the jury of writers told us 'but that would be giving too much away.
All I can say is that you make sure you watch for the ensuing reactions when the
overseas count is declared early on Saturday. Even if we don't go with a
validation of the entire count by the Secretary of State (which we feel might be
too final to maintain the plot's realism), we have some developments which I'm
sure will keep most of the US glued to their sets for the next few
days.
As the RW goes to press, we've just learnt that
Warner Brothers are the first to offer an undisclosed twelve figure sum for the
rights to make the television series into a film when the show finally closes on
air.
Nuffin the Hamster writes
for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.
