ASIA MEDIA WRITES – Do not miss (walk, not run, to) former Daily Show regular John Oliver’s own new show: LAST WEEK TONIGHT. It’s a Sunday night half-hour on HBO, and if the first show this past weekend (27 April) is any indication, it will be quite the winner. We ASIA MEDIA buffs can only give a noisy standing ovation to the telling segment ‘Indian Elections 2014 – Narendra Modi Vs. Rahul Gandhi.’ In just a few hilarious minutes Oliver gives you both a trenchant send-up of the idiotic U.S. news media, followed like a lapdog by an increasingly lame Indian TV, as well as a concise and accurate exposition of the impending Indian national elections.
The clever clip is viewable here. As Tom McCarthy of theguardian.com explains: “Indian politics? In fact, Oliver invested a daring five-minutes-plus on the parliamentary elections in India, which, with 850m eligible voters, is likely to be the largest exercise of democracy in human history, and even more likely, it seems, to be the object of immense indifference to the vast majority of people watching HBO at 11pm. The segment had some good lines. ‘Let’s deal with Gandhi first,’ Oliver said to tee up a bit on Indian National Congress candidate Rahul Gandhi. ‘And I realize it’s not the first time that sentence has been said in a British accent’.” We say: Watch this show to avoid becoming dumber! Congratulations to Oliver and his LAST WEEK TONIGHT staff for an impressive and witty launch.