Safran with his pants down
Waivers or changing their minds? Subjects in John Safran's series reportedly asked for key footage to be removed.
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John Safran’s Race Relations raised little more than an eyebrow after it premiered last week. The ratings were so-so, the backlash seemingly absent and the complaints to the ABC apparently low.
And all this despite press articles screaming about its content.
By Thursday it appeared those who were likely to be offended had stayed away, while the media itself was fatigued by stories about supposed moral outrage.
It would have been interesting to observe what the public might have made of it without the advance press.
In the first episode, Safran sniffs women’s underwear and makes a donation to a sperm bank before a photo of Barack Obama.
Today the Sunday Telegraph reports that Pussycat Doll Nicole Sherzinger asked for footage with her image be deleted. In the episode Safran interviewed her at Rod Laver Arena but managed to pilfer some of her underwear for his test on attraction to Eurasian women.
“Following completion of the program Nicole’s agent requested her removal from the program,” an ABC spokesman told the newspaper.
“Nicole is not portrayed in a negative light. The story and humour is very much about John Safran, and the joke is on him and his mischievous scientific experiment.”
The episode also failed to feature Mahalia Barnes, daughter of Jimmy Barnes.
“A creative decision was made to swap interviewees, to create the strongest possible story,” says the ABC.
The Australian last week reported the women involved signed waivers: “The women featured in the show were in on the joke and have all signed legal waivers.”
This week Safran wears ‘blackface’ in Chicago (pictured), to try and experience discrimination as a black person.
Source: Sunday Telegraph
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9 Responses
@GretelsLovechild The Hey Hey episode was a lot closer to blackface than John Safran.
Please look up the definition of someone being made up with blackface, before trying to stir the pot about John Safran dressing as a black male (as did Harry Connick Jnr).
I’ve just re-watched my Music Jamboree boxset. Still hilarious and supremely original. Love this guy.
Wow, there’s a big old ad for Race Relations next to this story. I had no idea the ABC had an advertising budget.
Although John is obviously going undercover as a black person, he is not actually doing “blackface”, which is more stylised and theatrical – almost clown-like.
People were similarly suggesting Robert Downey Jr had adopted “blackface” in Tropic Thunder after the Hey Hey controversy, which he hadn’t.
They may have signed release forms but did they sign them at the start of the interview before he stole their underwear or at the end when he they were still unaware that he did it? Once you were told I imagine you have two choices, jump up and down and try and get them to remove the footage or pretend that you weren’t humiliated and disgusted and go along with the joke.
I assume the whole pretense of “stealing their underwear” was in-fact fake, as was the experiment in the lab that came after, as well as the stuff in the middle east?
These social experiments are quite amusing.
But Nicole Sherzinger was in the episode. Does that mean she signed the waiver so they refused to remove her, or she’s to be removed for any future airings?