When Arnub met Sunny Leone

The Viral Fever’s Barely Speaking with Arnub is back

WrittenBy:Rajyasree Sen
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Everyone I know who has worked with Times Now Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami has told me that there are two Arnabs: the angry not-so-young man who screams and shouts in edit meetings, at reporters and in the studio; and his calmer doppelgänger who is sweet, polite and really helpful to juniors or colleagues outside the newsroom. Now, imagine a news world without Arnab Goswami. No sound, no fury and no one left to raise our eyebrows at. What would happen to Times Now and its wondrous ratings, which it keeps telling us about? What would Goswami do with all his free time?

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The comedy collective The Viral Fever taps into this potential dystopia in its new series, which marks the return of Arnub with a U. Last week, TVF released its bizarre and fun promo trailer of Arnub Is Back.

A little history, TVF over a year back had launched a series called Barely Speaking With Arnub. It was a hilariously well-cast spoof, with Biswapati Sarkar playing Arnab, sorry, Arnub to the T. Sarkar got Goswami’s mannerisms down pat in the series, which featured interviews with Shah Rukh Khan, Arvind Kejriwal after he’d resigned the first time round as Chief Minister of Delhi, and with the cast of Kill Dil. The spoof was so well-made that The Times Of India had actually tolerated being mocked and had partnered with TVF for the Kejriwal interview.

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TVF showed great form in the promo. No one is a holy cow – or safe from criticism. The trailer begins with a delicious spoof of Ravish Kumar. One Rabish Kumar has taken over as the voice and conscience of the nation in Arnub’s absence. His channel, STDTV, is “desh ka sarva shresth gaandphaad channel” (the world’s topmost ass-busting channel).

It’s while weeping over what primetime news has become in Arnub’s absence that the vice president of Times Wow, his intern Internjit and Arnub’s replacement Doorknob, discover there’s a nightly spike in decibel levels in the area surrounding the Doordarshan office. Why? Because Arnub is holed up in there!

I won’t give away the rest of the promo, but it includes Arnub as a recluse painter whose hero is Bhagat Singh (like most Indians who take their cues from Bollywood, Arnub thinks Bhagat Singh looks like Ajay Devgn) and a jibe for everyone, including Kejriwal for being a film critic, DD employees for supposedly locking up the DD studios and going home every day at 5pm, and Zoom TV cameramen, who can apparently be distracted by simply shouting “Look, cleavage!”

There’s much to love in the promo. Arnub is referred to as India’s sexiest news anchor. His favourite things are listed as TRPs, success, chicks and loud noises. In that order. The only reason he agrees to return to Times Wow and #MakeIndiaGreatAgain is when the Times Wow VP tells him that Navika has made jalebis in office. And his ending line of the promo is – “Liberals, you can suck my right cock. And moderates, you can suck my pussy”. It’s not funny when you read it, but the thought of the real Arnab Goswami saying this made me crack up.

Sadly, the first episode of the new series Barely Speaking With Arnub – Dwitiya doesn’t live up to this cracker of a promo, despite being promoted as the most desirable person in India interviewing Sunny Leone. Leone is the first in a line-up of people who Arnub thinks are helping #MakeIndiaGreatAgain, because she’s done the opposite of Brain Drain by coming back to India. The episode released on the www.tvfplay.com channel — which demands you cough up your email or Facebook credentials to login and see the episode — and is not on YouTube.

Should you give them your email and watch the episode? I would, because Sarkar is very funny as Arnub and the rivalry with Rabish is a great inclusion. The humour of the interviews I think will depend on the interviewee as well as the script – both of which were TVF’s undoing in this episode. But watch it, you must.

The episode is obviously meant to be a comment on that infamous interview of Sunny Leone by Bhupendra Chaubey. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to either tackle that interview head-on or break fresh ground on its own. Also, it’s badly conceived because it shows Leone at her weakest. I’ve now watched many episodes of Sunny Leone hosting Splitsvilla and many of her interviews. She’s extremely sharp, well-spoken and at ease when answering questions and not having to speak lines that are giving to her. When she’s delivering lines, in contrast, Leone comes across as stilted.This episode was less an interview and more Leone parroting dialogues, and it did nothing for either her or the programme.

There are two or three funny lines in this episode, like the observation that the greatest visionary who ever lived in India was Altaf Raja, because he sang, “tum toh thehre pardesi. Saath kya nibhaoge”. The ending, with the anti-Arnub, Rabish sitting on his haunches, wearing a lungi, with a lota by his side while brushing his teeth near the bushes outside the STDTV studio, is giggle-worthy. He announces that once again “amaavash” will descend on primetime, which gives us hope for coming episodes. I do think the biggest coup would be if Arnab decides to appear on the show. Much like in earlier episodes, even this one has a shout-out to Arnab to grace TVF with his presence.

It’s surprising that this first episode was as disappointing as it was because the earlier season’s interviews – especially the one with Kejriwal – were very funny. The banter was spot on, the jokes were topical, and there was a palpable ease in the conversation. The weakest in the series was Arnub’s interview of the Kill Dil team.

Yet for reasons best known to TVF, they didn’t start with an interview that played to their strengths of being satirical and newsy. Instead they went for clickbait, and the net result is just meh.

Barely Speaking With Arnub – Dwitiya suffers from the curse of the trailer, where the trailer is better than the real film.

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