Gay Mountain
| Gay Mountain | |
|---|---|
| Website | YouTube |
| Uploaded | 6 February 2014 |
| Uploader | Channel 4 |
| Duration | 0:01:30 |
| Category | Entertainment |
Gay Mountain is a 90-second video created for UK broadcaster Channel 4 by its in-house advertising agency 4Creative. It first aired across all of Channel 4's television channels on the day of the official opening of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, 7 February 2014, having been released on YouTube the previous night, on 6 February 2014. Within 48 hours of its online release (by 8pm 8 February 2014), it had accumulated over half a million views.
The video opens with a title slide saying: "Channel 4 proudly presents A SPECIAL WINTER ANTHEM" and depicts a fictional scenario in which a young woman enters a small auditorium and takes a seat as one of the last people to arrive. A man (Fred Bear of cabaret act Bearlesque), wearing a large brown fur coat, appears on stage and starts singing a song parodying the National Anthem of Russia, with his hand held to his chest.
Several members of the audience stand and emulate his gesture. Within a few bars, the singer turns around to face a red curtain behind him; this now opens up to reveal a rainbow arch with light bulbs which illuminate, and the music style changes into an up-beat dance track. Four female dancers, wearing cabaret costumes and sunglasses, appear and peel the fur coat off the singer, while putting a set of fake bear ears on his head. Now only wearing his boots, socks, red shorts with a fake bear tail and his bear ears, the man continues singing and dancing, repeating the chorus: "Good luck gays on Gay Mountain".
As the song progresses, more and more members of the audience get up and dance to the music and silver foil confetti rains from the ceiling. Among the cutaways to the audience, a young woman is seen happily dancing on her own, a male couple kiss and a topless DJ wearing sunglasses - who commentators have noted bears some resemblance to Russian President Vladimir Putin - is also dancing along to the music. Throughout, the lyrics of the song appear as Karaoke-style subtitles. The video ends with the music fading out and a closing slide wishing "GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE OUT IN SOCHI." It finally cuts to a station ident that features the Channel 4 logo, a super-imposed, revolving, rainbow-coloured prism and the caption: "BORN RISKY".
Channel 4's Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Dan Brooke, has been quoted as saying: "This is a typically Channel 4 way of celebrating the start of the Winter Games and showing our support to all of the athletes out in Sochi, gay or straight." The video was scheduled to be broadcast by the channel for a week after its launch and ties in with Channel 4's temporary rebranding of its logo in the rainbow colours, in response to Russian legislation restricting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, introduced in 2013, as well as widely reported human rights abuses against members of the LGBT community, such as those investigated in Channel 4's own documentary "Hunted", which was first broadcast in the "Dispatches" series on Wednesday 5 February 2014, in the run up to the Sochi Winter Olympics.
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