Politics get ridiculed by dolls on TET channel
While bright examples of sharp political satire can easily be found on Ukrainian websites, television has for some reason been reluctant to come up with anything worthy of the kind for a long time. Finally, Ukrainian TV has obtained an outstanding political comic show. TET channel proudly presents the puppet show “Pupsnya,” which has already premiered on the channel and is to be broadcasted nightly Monday through Friday. The first comparison that comes to mind for local viewer is “Dolls,” a show that was once a big hit on Russian channel NTV. However, the jokes of the latter were way to cutting and naturally couldn’t survive the strict censorship prevailing now in Russia. Perhaps to ensure the local show won’t enrage anyone, the general producer of the company that created the new show, Yuriy Stytskovskiy, hurried to assure everyone that the program will represent “kind” satire, critical but not severe.
The first episodes of “Pupsnya” have featured puppets depicting Viktor Yushchenko, Yuliya Tymoshenko, Nataliya Vitrenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, Oleksandr Moroz and Leonid Chernovetskiy, as well as the famous journalist and TV-presenter Savik Shuster. The show is made in the form of a news bulletin, in which everyday events are shown in a comical way. The female characters are dubbed by actress Yuliya Volodymyrivna, whose voice sounds very similar to that of Tymoshenko, and the male dolls are dubbed by Yuriy Kovalenko, a.k.a. Doctor Zvuk, a known voice imitator.
Considering the popularity of the similar “puppet shows” abroad, as well as the political situation in Ukraine, which delivers plenty of material for ridicule on a daily basis, it’s easy to predict that “Pupsnya” will become a hit. However, it depends a lot on how truly “kind” it’s going to be. After all, in a country where an election campaign features grumpy fellows shaking their fists from billboards and slogans like “Let’s Make Those Bastards Act Honest,” satire cannot permit itself to be too mild; otherwise the reality will outdo it.
