The 20th anniversary of the handover just took place, in case you hadn’t noticed. (Just kidding, we bet you’re sick of the coverage.) And, because the 20th anniversary of anything is kind of a big deal, the government held a metric buttload of celebratory events, including a super fancy, super boring gala.
Friday’s gala, which is held every five years, was attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, now-CE Carrie Lam, then-CE CY Leung, and other big-name bureaucrats. The actual content of the show is your usual patriotic (and dare we say propaganda-like) fare with songs praising Hong Kong and China, uniformed children waving props, choreographed dances… you know the drill.
For once though, the snoozefest show has actually been the subject of discussion after the strange “jazz hands” photo flashed on the screen around an hour and twenty minutes into TVB’s live broadcast. To be honest, we’re impressed that anyone made it that far into the program to even see the mistake.
According to TVB, the woman’s picture was used in a previous segment in the show by singer Leon Lai, whose performance featured 100 pictures of people smiling in the background. After media outlets, TVB viewers, and people who didn’t even watch the damn gala caught on to the hilarious mistake, a spokesperson for the broadcaster told Ming Pao said the gaffe was caused by a “malfunctioning computer”.
Well, at least they didn’t pretend it was intentional, unlike some people (#covfefe). Having said that, TVB can’t exactly get away with pretending they had pulled some kind of subversive political stunt, considering they rather suspiciously swapped a satirical current affairs show (which poked fun at the aforementioned big-name bureaucrats) from a prime time slot to a graveyard slot on the very same day. Tut tut.
