About 18 months ago, I admitted that watching The Australian edition of The Masked Singer was one of my more juvenile pleasures, and that I had speculated on whether embarrassed (rather than disgraced) former politician Sam Destyari had been the person inside the Wizard costume.
The Masked Singer is one of those shows which is so abysmally bad that it is good, the sort of crony TV where D-list celebrity has beens both ‘compete’ and ‘judge’. You can reflect on the desperation for cash and media attention which has caused some of these people to agree to inflict themselves upon the viewing audience once more.
In the USA, the current edition of this show is going to feature former New York mayor and trial attorney Rudy Giuliani. His reveal last week during filming caused ‘judges’ Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke to storm off the set – the type of free publicity which would have caused the producers to rub their hands together with glee.
This is just the latest stage in a very sad behavioural and reputational decline on the part of Mr Giuliani. His work as a legal representative of President Trump in seeking to get the 2020 election results overturned in court underlined the start of that decline.
As the porter in Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 3) put it when describing the legal profession:
Who’s there, in th’other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven…
Lawyers sometimes get paid to argue that night is day and the like, but they do not get applauded when they do so, particularly where the impacts of such arguments could have serious far reaching consequences, and so it went for Giuliani.
At the time he was doing such laudable public lawyering, he also allowed himself to become the figure of ridicule when newly applied hair dye started to stream down the side of his face, and he engaged in some bizarre on camera behaviour with a young actress who was involved in the new Borat film.
So now, he appears on The Masked Singer and causes someone like Robin Thicke, whose most innocuous recent behaviour involved a public twerk with Miley Cyrus, to storm off the stage in indignation. What is going through Giuliani’s mind and why is he behaving so erratically?
His legacy as mayor of New York at the time of 9/11 and his previous prosecutions of mob figures is now buried by all the bizarre behaviour of his dotage.
Lost For Words! 