In the spotlight

By Anna Malpas

Staff Writer

Published: July 25, 2008 (Issue # 1393)

It starts innocently enough. You’re at a party and someone gets out a guitar. Two hours later, you’ve heard the entire repertoire of Zolotoye Koltso and Alexander Rozenbaum, the soundtrack of “Irony of Fate,” and numerous songs about how the train conductor isn’t in a hurry, there are only nine men to every 10 girls and the coach driver can hold his horses. And everybody is absolutely word perfect, while you’re racking your brains for the words of “Yesterday.”

It’s an amazing skill, and Channel One must have had plenty of applicants for its latest game show, “Sing If You Can,” which searches for the owner of the largest memory bank of song lyrics.

The show is based on an American original format called “Singing Bee,” although I’m sure the songs featured there are very different. The presenter, Dmitry Shepelyov, pulls six contestants out of the audience and narrows them down to one with the help of fiendishly difficult quizzes, where they have to put song lyrics in the right order and complete lines from songs correctly.

Then the finalist has to do a solo performance by filling in the blanks in seven songs.

He or she can only make two mistakes. The prize after all that is a car. On the first show, it was hard to tell whether it was a Lada or a Maybach, since it was covered with balloons and had arpeggios of silver notes over the front grille.

The participants were so enthusiastic, literally running on to the stage and dancing along to the songs, that I suspected the involvement of actors. But 7 Dnei magazine reassured me with an article that said the channel auditioned 500 people. The best part of the show was the house band, which played its corny repertoire of Avraam Russo and “White Roses” absolutely straight and wore its satin shirts with pride.

No one won the main prize on Saturday. Finalist Lyubov threw herself onto the stage weeping after she blew it by mixing up “your” and “my” in the last song.

It was a horrible moment, especially as she had been performing — not just mouthing — every song and had dressed up in an outfit involving a lot of chiffon.

Shepelyov told her sweetly that “the car isn’t worth one of your tears,” but she didn’t look at all happy about the consolation prize of a karaoke machine.

Rather frighteningly, I recognized most of the songs and might even have completed the line about “wishing you the longest night out of a thousand nights” if the spoilsport makers hadn’t put the answers up on screen straight away. The emphasis was on late Soviet-era slow songs and a scattering of recent pop. And I bet the Americans don’t have a song called, “My Love Lives on the 25th Floor.”

This week, Channel One also started a season called “Night Dudes,” which shows the American version of “The Office,” David Duchovny in “Californication” and William Baldwin in “Dirty Sexy Money,” among other things. They’ve done the dubbing properly and in general it is a classy program.

The only problem: All the shows start at 11:20 p.m., as the channel is convinced a mass audience wouldn’t want to see these shows. Even though “Lost” has already been a huge hit on Channel One.

The preview session before each show is co-hosted by Katya Gordon, a presenter on Mayak radio station. She has now been suspended from her radio job after an on-air altercation with It Girl Ksenia Sobchak. I don’t know if the scandal was a factor, but she has finally got a chance to shine on national television.