Suspicions were first aroused after Yang demanded guests hand over their clothes, their boots and their motorcycle (Image: Lola)

By JONAS WHALE
Entertainment Correspondent

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – Questions were being raised about rising standards at China’s state broadcaster yesterday, after a top TV anchor was found to be a cybernetic organism sent from the future.

Until last weekend, Yang Rui was the relatively unknown presenter of CCTV show Monologue, in which Yang interviewed himself via a series of eclectic hand puppets.

That all changed this week, after faulty circuitry prompted an online diatribe against “foreign trash,” with the host accusing China’s foreign community of being secret GPS-mapping spies bent on the country’s destruction.

Alarmed bosses at CCTV ordered a product recall, where tests revealed rogue Terminator DNA.

“It explains a lot. The tight-ass demeanour, delusions of grandeur and absence of personality… just how many of China’s TV hosts are potential lethal killing machines?” wrote Grady Einstein, a known agitator for the anti-China US golfing magazine Fores.

Residue tests for talent initially came back negative but doctors were alarmed by traces of titanium alloy in Yang’s blood, it was reported.

An initial X-ray showed a microchip stamped with the Cyberdyne Industries logo. Further CAT scans failed to detect any brain activity, instead revealing a low-tech CPU and hard drive, both riddled with government propaganda and viruses.

“Yang’s CPU showed advanced deterioration in his circuitry, which can manifest itself in paranoid delusions of popularity,” noted a programmer. “He’s more machine now than man.”

Experts posit that Yang may have been a prototype sent back in time by Skynet as a test subject, then later abandoned.

“An early T-600 model would certainly explain his lack of charm,” the programmer said. “Personality was a later update used in the T-1000 – the silver morphing one.”

“We think his arrogance simply overrode his primary objective: to kill foreign bloggers in China,” a source closed to the project told China Daily Show. “Yang is convinced he is human and what’s more, believes himself to not only be an engaging TV personality but also the voice of every Asian person who has ever lived.”

Yang is currently being de-programmed at a secret facility in Seoul, where he will be joined this week by  a sympathetic Rui Chenggang.

“It’s been a traumatic process and there’s still a long way to go,” one doctor at the facility admitted. “We’ve had tantrums and sulks and even an aborted attempt to terminate the entire nursing staff.”

Not everyone is convinced by the explanation, however.

“Everyone knows that Judgement Day only happened because the machines became self-aware,” tweeted Einstein. “That’s one thing Yang clearly is not.”

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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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