Bye Bye, Infoman and the public’s alienation from politicians

In Quebec, politicians have a reason to dread New Year’s Eve. It’s the possibility of being ridiculed before the largest television audience of the year in the annual humorous reviews on the CBC’s French-language television network.

In particular, the popularity with both viewers and advertisers of the Bye Bye show that sees in the New Year is a phenomenon unique in Canada, a scaled-down version of the Super Bowl football game in the United States.

Bye Bye 2016 gathered a nearrecord audience of just under 3 million for its original broadcast on New Year’s Eve, the equivalent of nearly half of all Quebecers who speak French most often at home. The show was also repeated the next day, and is available on the web. Radio-Canada expected the final audience count to reach about 4 million.

Advertisers use the show to launch new campaigns, for which the public broadcaster opportunistically charges $50,000 for 30 seconds, and which it then crams into four-minute-and-30-second commercial breaks.

Unlike the Super Bowl, however, Bye Bye has never been rivalled for entertainment value by the relatively low-budget local spots, and the commercial breaks seem so interminable that a countdown eventually appears on screen to assure viewers that the show will return.

And for days afterward, the show is analyzed, criticized and debated in the Quebec media.

We’re fortunate to live in a society where we’re free to laugh openly at our politicians. For them, however, watching Bye Bye can be painful, if they are so unlucky as to have earned its scorn.

Bye Bye’s sketch humour is based on caricature. For a sketch to work, the audience must recognize the characteristic traits it exaggerates. So, a Bye Bye sketch shows a politician an unflattering image of himself or herself that is left with the audience at the end of the old year, and that it will take into the new one.

For example, in a parody of Game of Thrones about the Parti Québécois’s frequent factional feuds, new leader Jean-François Lisée was depicted as an ambitious and treacherous schemer. And in a takeoff of the Disney musical comedy Mary Poppins, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came across as naively optimistic.

If anything, however, Bye Bye is not quite as cruel to politicians as its increasingly popular lead-in Infoman, a weekly mock publicaffairs program whose review of 2016 drew 1.7 million viewers on New Year’s Eve.

For while Bye Bye’s sketches are imagined by scriptwriters, Infoman’s reports contain reality itself, or at least fleeting moments of it captured on camera and saved for showing at the end of the year.

La Presse columnist Mario Girard calls Infoman a “bêtisier,” a review of gaffes by public figures, notably politicians.

But Infoman goes beyond merely showing the faux pas itself. It invites the gaffer to participate further in his or her own public humiliation, in a sketch or an interview with the show’s host “Infoman,” Jean-René Dufort. Incredibly, the politicians often accept.

So, for example, after Infoman 2016 showed a clip of Higher Education Minister Hélène David idly picking her nose behind another minister speaking in the National Assembly, it ran another clip of her promising never to do it again.

Apparently, the participating politicians want to show that they are good sports, Regular Guys (or Gals) with whom the viewer would want to have a beer. As if that’s an important qualification for participating in running a government with a budget of $100 billion and nearly a half-million employees serving 8.3 million Quebecers.

But the politicians’ undignified pandering probably does nothing to increase public respect for them and their occupation.

Nor do the year-end reviews help to reduce the current public alienation from politics and politicians.

This year, the reviews were scrupulously even-handed in their treatment of the different parties (except for Québec solidaire, which went largely ignored), as if to avoid partisan complaints of bias.

The effect, however, may have been to confirm a belief among viewers that all politicians are the same, either fools or knaves.