Prank shows that are not funny

Peak viewing in the Arab world brings seasonal displays of cruelty on television

BEIRUT// Actor Wajih Sakr was driving with a friend near the Lebanese city of Byblos one morning when two cars full of masked gunmen intercepted them, ripping Sakr from the driver’s seat and forcing him into one of their vehicles.

Sakr, 47, was shoved down into the back seat so he could not see where he was going. A pistol pressed against his head discouraged any ideas about escaping.

On reaching their destination, a warehouse, his captors blindfolded him and bound him to a chair with handcuffs, chains and tape. “Who are you? What do you want?” he asked the gunmen . His questions were met with silence. As the futility of his situation set in, he broke down in tears, as his captors looked on.

But Sakr’s ordeal was no typical Lebanese kidnapping: it was just the most intense episode on last year’s Ramadan line-up of the Lebanese prank show

Hadde which translates as “Hold Albak, Your Heart”.

Prank shows aim to provoke anger, surprise or fear in their victims. But and sim

Hadde Albak ilar shows in Lebanon and the Arab world go farther, adding the threat of violence and death – often in situations that are, or have been, a reality in those countries.

Ramadan, which is set to begin this weekend, is peak TV viewing time in the Arab world, a month when stations seek to broadcast their best programming for captive, binge-watching audiences. For prank shows – and

Hadde is not the only one – this ofAlbak ten means it is the time to broadcast their most extreme stunts.

Another Lebanese prank show confronted an elderly man with a fake suicide bomber last year. And the show

Urgent Landing was dedicated to getting celebrities on chartered planes, only to have the aircraft face apparent catastrophe and impending doom once they took off from Beirut airport.

A prank show in Egypt had fake ISIL fighters kidnap an actress in a Ramadan episode last year, forcing a suicide vest on her as she cried and begged for her life.

These pranks not only trick their victims into thinking that they are about to die, they also frequently tap into real anxieties felt by their targets and by audiences.

Lebanon and Egypt have suffered suicide bombings by ISIL and other extremist groups and the fear of another is always in the back of people’s minds. In Lebanon, kidnappings motivated by politics, feuds or lucrative ransoms occur frequently. In one prank

Hadde Albak a young Syrian worker was stopped, stripped and humiliated by armed men running a fake security checkpoint – a cruel joke in a country where many of the unwanted 1.5 million Syrian refugees live in constant fear of mistreatment at checkpoints.

“These shows express the daily anxieties of the people who live there,” said Marwan Kraidy, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a book about reality television in the Arab world.

“It expresses them sometimes in a very crude way … sometimes maybe an unprofessional or unethical way, but they nonetheless express the anxieties of the population, of the audience of the shows.”

Sakr was so disturbed by what happened that he did not give the show permission to broadcast the episode for two years. “The target of these programmes is to make people laugh. People didn’t laugh. They were really afraid for me and some were crying through this episode,” he said.

Despite a backlash against prank programmes, Prof Kraidy expects them to continue.

“Commercial TV is a race to the bottom and this is the kind of stuff that gets eyeballs, so there’s a pretty high likelihood it will continue in the absence of any enforced constraints,” he says.

There is a chance that such shows will damp down their more extreme content. After the prank they played on the young Syrian man last year,

Hadde Alfaced fierce criticism within bak Lebanon.

Now OTV, the station that produces the show, has scrubbed evidence of that episode and others from its website and YouTube, although it is not clear if that was in response to the disapproval. The show’s host and apparent mastermind, Marcel Khadra, now hosts a nearly identical show on OTV called ,

Tak Tik though its pranks have not yet plumbed depths.

Hadde Albak’s Khadra promised interviews to on several occasions in recent months but ultimately remained unavailable.

Despite what he went through, Sakr says his ordeal was not entirely bad. In a Ramadan TV series this year, he is portraying a Canadian national who is kidnapped while in Lebanon. And because he has been kidnapped himself, he says, he knows how to truly play the role.

Prank shows broadcast their most extreme stunts during Ramadan because of viewership