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A complainant said The Chase NZ host Paul Henry’s comments denigrated Indian culture, but – by the narrowest of margins – the BSA disagreed.
The Chase NZ host Paul Henry has narrowly outrun the Broadcasting Standards Authority, after a complaint about comments he made about Indian food on the quiz show.
Henry, who hosted a limited-run New Zealand season of the hit British show last year, joked with a contestant who said they would spend any prize money on a trip to the Taj Mahal in India.
Henry, who is also now a TVNZ board member, told the contestant: “You’ve got to be so careful what you eat” and that several of his friends had “exploded” in the Taj Mahal, where it was “very hard to find a bathroom”.
Later in the episode, Henry said: “$45,000, Taj Mahal, you can buy a lot of wet wipes with that.”
The four members of the BSA considered a complaint that Henry breached the discrimination and denigration broadcasting standard.
The BSA said the complainant believed the comments had “the potential to encourage discrimination against India and Indian people, through reinforcing harmful racial stereotypes that India (and, by association, Indian people) are dirty and unhygienic”.
“They are colonial-era narratives that have historically been used to demean Indian people and South Asian communities and to portray their environments as inferior,” said the complainant.
“The reduction of a culturally and historically significant monument to the centre of crude toilet humour directly reinforces these stereotypes.”
The complainant also referred to historic, controversial comments Henry made more than 15 years ago when he was host of TVNZ Breakfast – including mocking the name of Sheila Dikshit, an Indian government minister, and questioning whether then Governor General Sir Anand Satyanand was a real New Zealander because of his heritage.
In a just-released decision, two BSA members, chair Susie Staley and Karyn Fenton-Ellis, said the comments on The Chase did not breach the discrimination and denigration standard; the other two members, John Gillespie and Aroha Beck, said it did.
Because of Staley’s position, the majority of the board therefore rejected the complaint.
The authority said the majority of members found the comments appeared intended as a humorous anecdote focused on Henry’s friends’ unfortunate travel experiences and could not be said to implicitly refer to, or target, Indian people in this way.
NZ Herald
