AUG 4 — On the bright side, at least 8TV has finally managed to produce some worthwhile entertainment. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t entertaining in the intended way, and maybe it only involved 90 seconds of actual content, but it’s still an order of magnitude more engaging than the rest of the network’s dopey and misshapen brainchildren. Still a long way off from the stuff they buy in from overseas, but hey — progress is progress.

The furore over the network’s Homerically misguided Ramadan “public service” campaign is easy to understand (unless you’re Ahmad Izham Omar, 8TV’s CEO). The protagonist of said ads is a young, female, Chinese intruder making a spectacle of herself in a reassuringly Malay pasar Ramadan.

She squeals and gorges herself and flaunts her shoulders and armpits like a common hussy; basically she’s well out of order, but still not so bad that any of the nice normal folk around her are going to get angry. No, they just stare, as though at a misbehaving child, while the viewer is treated to various slapstick sound effects that would’ve sounded out of date to Charlie Chaplin. Chinese people — they do the darndest things.

The train-wreck is then consummated by a trio of friendly human facades — I’m guessing they’re famous — who grin and plead with us all not to get carried away this Ramadan. Please don’t get carried away. All we ask is that you stop being such loud, obnoxious, insensitive idiots for one month. Just one lousy month. Please.

Never mind the ads, though, and their amazing ability to offend both Chinese and Malay people — even more galling was the network’s subsequent reaction. First Ahmad Izham took to Twitter to tell everyone to chillax and stop “over-thinking.” You could reasonably sum up his argument as: “Aww, come on! Really? Come on!”

After figuring out that this might have fallen a little bit short, he then announced that the ads had been pulled and, maintaining the sullen and mutinous air of a reprimanded 12-year-old, followed this with a tweet about trombones, prefaced with “And now to more important things.” In footballing circles this is referred to as “an own goal”, or alternatively “so brainless as to defy biology.”

That tweet has since joined the offending ads in pulled-land, and the network and its CEO have ventured a little further into damage-limitation territory, with tweets and Facebook page updates containing unqualified apologies. But not for the ads. No, instead they thought it would be a better idea to apologise for an alleged “misinterpretation” perpetrated by offended viewers.

Most of Malaysia’s broadcast media is run based on the premise that the public is about as smart as a collection of sheds. This is probably why 8TV issued an apology which basically amounts to: “We’re sorry you’re too stupid and thin-skinned to fathom our creative genius.”

Of course, the public isn’t actually as idiotic as your average media exec, so it didn’t take long for a new backlash to sweep in, this time against the apology. By the way, if you’re reading this, 8TV folk: while the misunderstood-genius apology is valid in theory, for it to work in practise you’d have to be, I don’t know, Bill Hicks. Now, before you get carried away, I feel it’s only responsible of me to point out that you’re not Bill Hicks. No. Nope. Not a chance. All is not lost, though — there’s always Michael Richards and the temporary insanity plea.

While I’ve got your attention, 8TV people who for some reason thought these ads were a good idea — I don’t actually think you’re proper racists. No, I understand why you’re so bewildered by the backlash, because, bless your hearts, you harboured no ill-will towards any ethnic group in coming up with those ads.

Unfortunately, from your reaction so far I get the feeling that you haven’t worked out that there are, in fact, two kinds of racism. The one kind, the kind you think you’re being accused of, is the preserve of the Ku Klux Klan and Ibrahim Ali — nasty, malicious stuff. The other kind, the kind you’re actually being accused of, is the domain of embarrassing grandmothers and Silvio Berlusconi — people who are just too ignorant, or set in their ways, or stupid, or up their own backsides, to realise the implications of what they’re saying.

And since you guys are a largely young and multiracial group and, like your CEO, probably consider yourselves enlightened liberals, you can’t really claim to be ignorant or set in your ways — so unfortunately I guess this means you’re just stupid and up yourselves. But — crucially — you’re not malicious. The ads were still insensitive, though, so you really should apologise properly. And on air this time, please. Everybody knows that Twitter and Facebook are ancillary. Since the fruits of your idiocy were broadcast, that’s how you should hawk the fruits of your contrition.

To be honest, though, the viewers aren’t the ones who ought to be most outraged by your antics. No, that dubious honour falls to the estate of the late Austro-British philosopher Karl Popper, who is quoted in your first laughable attempt at a statement of apology, issued via your Facebook page.

The quote in question is from Popper’s Unended Quest: “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.” Your “apology” builds on this hilariously grandiose opening by asserting that “this is the unfortunate situation that has resulted from the 8TV Ramadan public service announcement (PSA).”

Seriously, guys. Right now, thanks to you, poor Karl is kicking and screaming in the hereafter. I mean, this is the guy who argued that tolerance is so important that to preserve it you can be intolerant of intolerant people. He wrote “The Open Society and its Enemies”, for crying out loud. That’s basically like a thousand pages about how the 8TV Ramadan ads are stupid and bad.

If you 8TV types want to be racist that’s one thing, but for the love of all that’s holy just leave Karl Popper out of it. The man’s dead. What did he ever do to deserve being dragged down into your little underworld of ineptitude? If you want a noted quotation which will help you feel justified in these troubled times, I suggest you try this one from Bill Hicks: “I can’t watch TV longer than five minutes without praying for nuclear holocaust.” Whatever people might say, it takes skill to inspire that same reaction in only 90 seconds, and that’s something you can be proud of.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.