Woke or Broke

“Better broke than woke!” screeches former Prime Minister and certified swivel eyed loon Liz Truss at the climax of her new GBNews game show Woke or Broke, as she declares one team of contestants the victors, despite them having gambled and lost their prize money. The show – a new departure for the right wing ‘news’ channel, as it tries to broaden its appeal and boost viewer numbers into double figures – sees two teams pitched against each other with the choice of choosing the ‘woke’ option each round, or gambling their money on an outrageous wager. While ‘Going Woke’ will ensure contestants maintaining their dignity, building moral integrity and making modest financial gains, the alternative would see them compromising themselves and their principles for potentially far greater gains while also running the risk of losing everything. “It’s an attempt to answer the fundamental question of our times – is it better to do the woke thing and be smugly comfortable and mediocre, or risk everything regardless in the hope of winning big?” says Rich Dixer, who devised and now produces the show. “All the time we have the lefties telling us how wokery is better than self interest and its own reward, so our show puts it to the test. Will the woke contestants be satisfied with their modest winnings, or will they give in and go for broke? Will they be happier in the knowledge that they at least gave it a shot, even if they end up broke?”

Even after the broadcast of only a few episodes, the show has attracted a barrage of criticism, not just for its humiliation of contestants and its overall cruelty, but also for the alleged bias of host Liz Truss. “Bearing in mind that Truss has consistently blamed the so-called ‘Wokerati’ for her disastrous, but thankfully short, tenure as Prime Minister, is she really the right person to preside over this show?” asks Trevor Chonks, TV critic for the Daily Norks. “According to her, the economy crashed because of a cabal of Marxists running the Bank of England and other financial institutions, rather than as a result of her own insane economic plans – she’s manifestly unbalanced and the way she runs the show clearly reflects this.” Chonks points to the way in which, even when the ‘woke’ contestants win, Truss always intervenes to ensure that they still don’t take anything home. “Last week, for example, she abruptly told the winning team that in order to finance all the ‘wokery’ they’d supported, a new 100% tax rate would be required, so they had to hand back all their winnings,” he says. “The week before that, she invented a new round at the end, forcing the ‘woke’ winners to donate all their money to charity on the flip of a coin! To add insult to injury, once they’d lost the coin toss, she announced that the ‘charity’ was actually the losing team, who had previously lost everything on a bet that they could eat food scavenged from bins without throwing up!”

Dixer defends the show on the grounds that it merely reflects real life. “Look, we all know that fate can sometimes hang on the likes of a coin toss,” he opines. “Challenges like eating spoiled food from bins, or, as in the pilot episode, food which doesn’t meet namby pamby EU standards, simply reflect the realities facing many people living in poverty these days. If contestants prefer to take the safe woke option rather than taking the same risks as the poor people they claim to want to help, then they have to be prepared for a righteous reversal of fortune!” He also defended another hugely criticised challenge in a recent show, where contestants could win big money on gambling whether they could safely swim in excrement, as reflecting the realities faced by the average British family when currently visiting the beach. “Listen, one of them might have become seriously ill days after swallowing some of the crap and they all might have suffered from skin disorders after swimming in it, but they tripled their money and ended up the show winners that week, whereas their opponents, who opted to try and safely clear all the sewage out of the pool and safely cleanse the water went home with nothing to show for their efforts,” says Dixer. “Not only did th winners show that it was worth the risk, but also that all that woke wailing about the supposed health risks of discharging raw effluent into rivers and the sea is just nonsense!”

The programme has also been criticised for its definition of ‘woke’. “Things like opting to clean up polluted waters, observe health and safety guidance around power tools or refrain from shouting terms of racial abuse at groups of ethnic minorities – to name but three of the ‘challenges’ on recent editions – is hardly ‘woke’,” notes Chonks. “Surely it is simply a case of doing not just the right thing, but the responsible thing? Do this show’s makers really want to send the message that irresponsibility and reckless risk-taking is the best route to success?” Noted academic Professor Bob Mincer concurs, contending that ‘woke’ itself is an utterly meaningless term, a linguistic construct created by the right as a buzzword with which to try and discredit and denigrate anything seen as ‘liberal’. “It has replaced ‘political correctness’ as their catch-all dismissal for anything that tells them that they can no longer behave in an unacceptable or offensive manner any more,” muses the Chair of Linguistic Ethics at the South Bermondsey College of Barbering. “It carries with it the implication that anything that isn’t exploitative, cruel or self interested is simply a sign of weakness, both in the individual and wider society.”

Woke or Broke is widely seen as GBNews’ response to rival TalkTV’s recent launch of its own game show, presented by former Home Secretary Priti Patel from a refugee centre in France, in which would be immigrants to the UK are forced to engage in various physical challenges in order to win an inflatable boat and a chance to cross the Channel to the Kent coast. Both programmes have increased pressure on TV regulator OFCOM to investigate these channels’ continued use of sitting Tory MPs to present their shows, in apparent contravention of current broadcasting guidelines. GBNews, meanwhile, is rumoured to be planning another political entertainment show, in which former UKIP leader Nigel Farage takes on a representative of a different EU member state every week in a bare knuckle fight, in order to test the proposition that EU membership ‘makes you soft’ and that ‘being well hard’ is a top ‘Brexit benefit’.