Nice post by Bunmi on a satirical Kenyan puppet TV show. I'm always amazed by how much you can get away with in goofy-lookin' television that would get you in trouble, or at least in uncomfortable conversations, if you wrote it in a newspaper. My father and I went to Chile in 2004, right around the time that the two major networks started running their novels, the soap-opera-style long miniseries that run for about six months each year and compete agains each other. That year, one of the shows was called "Hippie" and set on a college campus in the 1960's, and the other one was a Western. Our contacts in the country wanted to give us some hint of what to look for, because of course we were watching these things every time we could, and settled on the following maxim: nuns mean trouble. Members of the military, too. Both of those sentiments, and the political ideas behind them, namely the corruption of the Catholic church and the Army, would be difficult to discuss straight-up in Chilean society. But for the main character in "Hippie" to find out he's secretly the illegitimate child of the university chancellor and a nun?* No problem. It's just for laughs, right?
*I am not kidding about this, by the way. The translated Wikipedia description of the novela runs as follows: "Martin Hidalgo, medical student brought up by his mother and never met his father, is the leader of Chilean university students in a full decade of the 60, which leads to heavy clashes with the Chancellor Maximilian Sierralta. His strongest rival is Andres, law student and son of Maximilian, who was engaged in a hard struggle for the presidency of the federation of students and the love of Magdalena, a literature student from a wealthy family." If anyone could hook me up with DVDs of this, I would be ETERNALLY grateful.