Comedian and host John Oliver has a knack for telling it like it is. It is this trait of his that has won his HBO show, ‘Last Week Tonight With John Oliver’, legions of loyal followers.
In this week’s episode, that is Episode #4 of Season 7 of the show, which aired Sunday night in the US and will air in India on Tuesday morning, viewers brought to John’s notice the fact that the Indian streamer Hotstar, which streams HBO content in India, cut out his episode from a couple of weeks ago where he had criticised Indian PM Narendra Modi and his policies. Let alone censor the offending part of the episode, the entire episode was cut out of Hotstar’s content line-up for the week.
That caught John Oliver’s attention, and unsurprisingly, the target of John Oliver’s trademark plain-speak was none other than Hotstar. Oliver slammed Hotstar for indulging in self-censorship of this kind, saying that it was not a good idea at all. He also aired clips of a couple of previous episodes of his show that were unceremoniously censored by Hotstar in a spot of misplaced righteousness.
The two episodes had made fun of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, which being Disney characters, and Hotstar being a Disney-owned entity, Hotstar’s sensitivity regarding the aforementioned characters seems quite obvious. But that, according to John Oliver, is obviously not a good thing.
So he went ahead and threw down the gauntlet at Hotstar by announcing to the streamer, “If you think that you have to remove anything that reflects poorly on Disney from this show, I have some bad news for you, my friends. I am f**king Zazu right here. Everything that comes out of this beak is a ‘Disney Fact.”His reference was obviously to the fact that he had voiced Zazu in the recent live-action remake of Disney’s The Lion King.
The episode where John Oliver blasts Hotstar will air Tuesday morning in India. Let’s hope we get to watch the entire episode and not an uncensored one. Now, over to Hotstar.
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