In Chinese TV talent show, older women stars compete to be pop idols, with Aaron Kwok among judges and Huang Xiaoming presenting
- Modelled on a 2016 South Korean contest, the show from Mango TV and Hunan TV bucks the trend of reality shows that put teenage unknowns in the spotlight
- Once Chinese internet users got over the shock of women in their 50s vying for pop idol status, some welcomed their participation
Show business can be notoriously unforgiving in its treatment of female stars of a certain age.
Paparazzi train their camera lenses on the wrinkles and crow’s feet on their once-unlined faces; good roles become scarce as they grow older, with many missing out on parts in major films and TV series; and once their names disappear from the screen or music charts, they are written off as has-beens.
Announced last week, the reality show – whose title Chengfengpolang De Jiejie, roughly translates as “sisters riding the winds and breaking the waves” – will feature 30 Chinese female stars who are – gasp – over 30, vying for a spot in a five-member band. The programme will air in June.
Produce Camp 2020 , launched recently by Chinese online entertainment giant Tencent’s television arm, is a Chinese take on the popular South Korean K-pop reality show Produce 101, which features 101 female trainees going head to head to secure a position in a new idol group. The second season of a similar show, Youth with You, premiered in March on video platform iQiyi. Youku, a video hosting service, is producing a reality-TV show for young male wannabe idols. (Youku is operated by Youku Tudou, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, owner of the South China Morning Post.)
These hit productions are not only popular among Chinese viewers but also among aspiring young artists, as they have proved to be an effective route to success and stardom.
The casting of older female stars in a reality TV show was pioneered by South Korean TV station KBS, which aired Sister’s Slam Dunk in 2016. The show showed a cast of mature female stars overcoming the odds to form a girl group called Unnies, who subsequently released a single titled Shut Up.
The Hunan TV show could be a golden opportunity for the chosen women to enjoy a second stab at fame. The show’s promotional poster says it wants to redefine all-female pop bands.
“Thirty sisters gather together to overcome all grudges … and labels. They will undergo gruelling training to show their best selves on stage. By rising to intense competition and challenges, they will transform themselves … to form a band,” it reads.
True to the promise of gruelling training, the participants were recently left exhausted after a 20-hour dance shoot, according to Chinese media reports.
Chinese-speaking internet users were initially shocked, upon reading the list of show participants released last week, to see that it included actresses and singers over the age of 50, but they soon warmed to the boundary-breaking idea, leaving comments online expressing their hopes that the show would give its stars the recognition they are due.
One user of Douban, a Chinese film and TV review aggregation site, wrote: “Is this for real? There’s finally something different amid the glut of cookie-cutter talent shows”. Another wrote in a forum on Baidu, China’s answer to Google: “It will be nice to see [the contestants] support each other. They are well-recognised stars who are much better than those teenage contestants [in other shows] whom hardly anyone has heard about before.”
