By XING CHOUWEN
Entertainment correspondent

Chau is said to often boast of his prowess in private, friends claim

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – No sooner has Edison Chen announced his return to  singing than the Chinese entertainment industry is set to be rocked by another sex scandal, this time involving CCTV milquetoast James Chau.

Chau is best known as the presenter of CCTV News and Worldwide Watch, both shows recently implicated in a scandal involving a Minnesotan family forced to watch CCTV-9 during a purported ten-hour ordeal.

Chau’s woes were set to increase last night though, after a lengthy sex tape, featuring the host with three unidentified females, began doing the rounds on the Internet.

Lovingly deemed “the sixth fuwa” by admiring Chinese mainlanders, Chau’s unimpressive and effeminate physical features have long convinced an adoring public that the star is, at best, an non-threatening beta male. Viewers of the tape — which China Daily Show has seen excerpts of — report an entirely different impression, however.

During the four-and-a-half hour footage, Chau is seen effortlessly maneuvering between stand-up-69 and “downward-facing-dog”, and performs a number of other positions with practiced aplomb, including advanced techniques such as the “Horizontal Mambo” and the “Rifleman.”

“Holy crap, you have got to be kidding!” was the reaction of “Captain Tofu,” one of many netizens commenting on Mop and Sina, two popular Chinese forums. Other comments included “Go, James! I never knew you had it in you” (“zerogame”) and “Cute… his cock looks like a small, fleshy cork” (“Xinhua4ever”).

But not all reactions were supportive. Many fans felt betrayed, having taken Chau’s clean-cut image to heart. “I had taken down my James Chau doll from the firing place [sic]!” stormed “d67shu” while “ren6ren” complained “Too much… I never wanted to see more than his real head. Now brother has seen both heads! Fuck!”

Some also criticized comments Chau allegedly makes during the tape including “Screw condoms” and “You’ve seen one AIDS victim, you’ve seen them all, I’m telling you. Seriously, move on with your life, people. Chau coming through!”

Chau is the first Chinese mainlander to be appointed a National UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador for China. A UN representative last night said she was unaware of the tape and could not comment further.

According to one former Cambridge classmate, Matilda Wu, Chau had a well-established reputation as a ladies’ man and amateur swordsman while at the university.

“He was known as ‘Hung Kok’. James was a total player,” Wu told China Daily Show, adding that Chau had also gamely agreed to appear as Mr September in the 1996 Cambridge Student Body Calendar. Representatives of Chau were unavailable for comment at the time of going to press.

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By JONAS WHALE
Entertainment Correspondent

The Beard family’s anguish is evident in this picture, released to media this morning. Both female Beards are receiving medical attention

SAINT PAUL (China Daily Show) – A Minnesota family returned to the US yesterday after enduring a ten-hour quarantine, during which all five were allegedly forced to watch the English-language channel CCTV-9 without pause.

But reports indicated the family’s ordeal could fetch hundred of thousands of dollars in media deals, after officials at the Guinness Book of Records confirmed that the viewing marathon broke all previous known records.

The Beard family nightmare began last Wednesday, according to patriarch Nathan Beard, 46, speaking at a brief press conference organized by legal representatives.

“We were wandering through the conference room at our Marriott Chongqing hotel when my wife began sneezing. She has a dust allergy and I don’t think anyone had cleaned the place for weeks,” Beard told reporters.

Within minutes of the sneezing outbreak, hotel staff had quarantined the family, apparently under the belief that they were potential avian-flu sufferers.

“‘You have the bird sick, so sorry,’” one of them allegedly said.

“After about an hour, two members of staff wearing surgical masks came in with a tray of sandwiches, turned the television onto CCTV-9 and left. They were very polite but refused to answer our questions,” Beard explained.

“After they left, we heard numerous sounds that indicated locks, chains and filing cabinets were being piled up outside  the door to prevent our escape,” Beard recalled. “But worse was still to come – we realized that they’d also taken the remote and the TV controls were out of reach.

“After about ten minutes, they started broadcasting Dialogue and Tian Wei’s face appeared on the screen. It was at that point that I began to panic.”

Beard’s voice quavered as he went onto describe a scarcely-believable schedule of televisual banality, that included the same piece of news footage about a bombing in Yemen broadcast six times within a single hour and an advert for the Port of Dandong which Beard described as being “like a zombie. That sucker wouldn’t die.”

Following a Chinese-language programme presented by Canadian TV personality, and alleged visa-dodger, Mark Roswell, aka Dashan, Beard claims his wife Sheryl, 39, begun complaining of a headache.

Three hours into the scheduled programming, 29-year-old son Phillip’s eyeballs “rolled back inside his skull and he began convulsing.”

Medical experts have repeatedly warned foreigners in the past of the dangers of excessive CCTV-watching, with symptoms including “frothing at the mouth, finger-pointing, unnatural optimism about the Shanghai Expo and the unshakeable conviction that the world outside China’s borders is borderline anarchy,” according to NYU psychology professor Ebert Wai.

Sheryl and Jessica Beard, both seven, are said to be in a stable condition in a psychiatric hospital.

And in an unexpectedly positive development to the case, Guinness officials have let it be known they wish to verify the Beards’ claims.

The previous record for watching the state media channel uninterrupted is three hours, held by Maine State Hospital for the Mentally Disturbed resident Ellis MacBain, 43.

Chongqing hotel staff yesterday refused to comment on the allegations. “We have never spoken to the Beards and we are not even hotel,” said Marriott representative Li Hu.

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