Attia mania

The winner of the satellite programme "Star Academy" was greeted at the airport last week by a mob of adoring fans. Yasmine Fathi looks into the frenzy surrounding the show

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Fans flocked to the airport to greet Star Academy's Mohamed Attia photo: El-Sayed Abdel-Qader

"I can't breathe, I can't breathe," screamed a pallid-faced Mohamed Attia moments after his arrival at Cairo airport, suffocating amid a sea of worshipping fans. The winner of Star Academy had just returned from Lebanon where he had been filming the final portion of the show. Waiting anxiously for his return were thousands of admirers, each trying to get closer to the 21-year-old who had overnight become a household name.

Launched by the Lebanese Broadcasting Company (LBC) last December, Star Academy -- a "reality TV" programme -- brought 16 male and female Arabs in their late teens and early 20s together under one roof. The aim? Competing for $50,000 and a record deal. All proceeded to take singing, acting, dancing and sports lessons, with LBC presenting one-hour summaries of the day's events each evening, and a 24-hour Arabsat channel providing non- stop coverage, each giving viewers an insider's glimpse into their classes, their socialising, even their patterns of sleeping.

Each week, class teachers were to nominate two students, one of whom would be voted out by viewers on Friday's "Prime" live show.

To talk about ratings does little justice to the programme's success. The airport scene of Attia's arrival perhaps is a more apt rendering -- screaming girls and boys running down airport ramps and hallways trying to get closer to the so-called "accidental hero".

In recent weeks, the show has been the natter of talk shows and the Arab media, documenting this obsession in youth between the ages of 15 and 25, and looking into how the show's popularity took off to such extremes.

"I don't think everybody watched it from the beginning," Nehal Khamis, a Star Academy-watching secretary told Al- Ahram Weekly. "At first two of my friends would come over to my house to watch Prime. By the last Prime we were 50 girls," she mused. Khamis added that popularity in Egypt skyrocketed when the word began to spread that there was a quirky Egyptian that had a chance of winning the show.

In fact, the Friday Prime became a social event that could not be missed by many Egyptian families.

"We always made sure not to plan anything on Friday night," said one woman in her 40s. "I was even scared that my pregnant daughter-in-law would give birth during one of the Primes."

For other people, however, the daily hour was not enough, and only the 24-hour channel satisfied their appetite.

"I would put on the Star Academy channel as soon as I got home," explained economist Mona Tawfiq. "I always wanted to know what they were doing. It's like having people living with you in your house."

During the final week, when the competition narrowed between Kuwait's Bashar El-Shatti and Egypt's Attia, the frenzy escalated. Thousands of people tapped into the sphere of cellular space, SMSing their votes for their native rising star. Ahmed Attia, Mohamed's older brother, made his own allegiance known on Nogoum FM (Stars FM), calling for Egyptians to propel his brother to the winning spot. And mobile provider MobiNil offered every person who voted for Attia a free minute's calls.

"I voted non-stop all week, and I made all my friends as well as my hairdresser vote too," said Olvia Badr, a housewife in her 40's.

As the final Prime showing started on Friday 2 April, viewers across the Arab world sat on the edge of their seats, anxious, excited, apprehensive about who would be crowned.

The final result: 44.9 per cent of the votes went for Bashar with 55.1 per cent going to Attia.

On the radio, on Arab TV music channels, television shows, and in thousands of homes in Egypt and across the Arab world, people went wild. At the airport last week, the party continued.

Ingy Alaa, 21, a mass communications student at the American University in Cairo (AUC), was part of the crowd. "My friends and I arrived at 7pm and the airport was already very crowded," she told the Weekly. "There were several buses from Tanta and one from Libya. People were standing in front of the arrivals hall chanting Attia's name while waving the Egyptian flag. Until that moment everything was under control," she reported.

As the clock approached 9pm, however, the scene began to change. Egyptian actors Samy El-Adl and Ahmed El- Saqqa, and Lebanese singer Waleed Tawfiq were spotted emerging from the airport.

"El-Saqqa was the last to emerge," Alaa said. "As soon as people saw him they started running towards him and broke the iron bars that the police had put to separate them from the airport gates. From that moment on everything was out of control."

As Attia appeared at the main door, the crowds started running towards him. Boys were grabbing him, girls kissing him, everyone screaming his name and pushing closer to the new idol.

"I really thought my son was going to be suffocated to death," said his father Abdel-Fattah Attia. "His mother fainted as she watched her son's face turn red from the lack of air," he continued.

Attia escaped from the mob, running into the parking lot and jumping on top of a parked car. It did little good -- fans jumped on top with him.

His second attempt to escape took him off the car and sprinting into the airport and the VIP lounge. Minutes later, Attia was seen emerging in a car that sped out of the airport.

It didn't quite stop there, his father telling the press that the Attias were chased by frenzied fans in cars for two and a half hours, until they approached Tanta, Attia's hometown. There, hundreds of fans once again awaited him, making the task of sneaking Attia into a local hotel a backdoor escapade. He finally made it home to his brother's apartment at 4am.

Malak Mohamed, participant in "the chase", spoke to the Weekly. "We were after him for 20 minutes until they finally stopped for us," said Mohamed, a political science student at Cairo University. "We just wanted to tell him that we love him and that he's great," she explained.

Like thousands of others, Mohamed cannot quite get enough of her local hero. The whirlpool of near-fanaticism that has swept up the Attias has not yet subsided. "We have not been able to have a normal life since 2 April," the star's father told the Weekly. "Our house is always filled with relatives, well-wishers as well as journalists. We can't sleep and we don't even cook anymore, we eat only fast food."

To the outside observer, the frenzy is intriguing. But according to Hanzada Fikry, lecturer at the Department of Journalism & Mass Communication at AUC, told the Weekly that "reality TV" had the same effect on audiences 20 years ago when it was introduced in the West.

"As broadcasters, when we want more people to watch our show we put in a human interest angle; things that can make people laugh and cry," Fikry explained. "A technique that we call 'a slice of life'."

Part of that technique -- and perhaps the most attractive element of the show -- is that viewers are encouraged to identify with contestants. "You are not staring at the screen and fantasising about a movie star or a singer," Fikry says. "You are looking at normal people like you." You are looking, in essence, at someone whose place you can one day fill.

Hisham Ramy, associate professor of psychiatry at Ain Shams University and a consultant psychiatrist in England, said it is the simplicity of these shows that is attracting audiences. "These days life is complicated," he explained to the Weekly. "There's a lot of lying and deceit, even soap- operas are exaggerated. So when you provide people with something simple that involves young people socialising and having a good time, it makes people feel that they are having a good time too," he explained.

And of course one cannot disregard the tendency of youth to look up to society-created "stars". "Nowadays people are obsessed with these stars. They want to know how they are made," sociologist Nagwa Fawal told the Weekly. "Abdel-Halim Hafez travelled all the time, but no airport turned into a circus because of him, did it?" she asked.

Some critics and analysts opine that part of the craze may be political. "We are having wars, our soccer team is losing, and all of a sudden an Egyptian wins in a contest," psychiatrist Ramy mused. "The people immediately perceive it as Egypt that has won. They project their own feelings on one person, Attia, who at the end of the day only wanted to win the prize and become an entertainer."

These political undercurrents were indeed reflected during Prime's last show, where it was no longer Bashar versus Mohamed, but rather Kuwait versus Egypt. National identification, however, is normal, Fikry points out.

"These shows are not promoting unity among Arabs. They are cultivating the ethnic feelings of each Arab country that surfaces whenever there is a competition," she said, adding that they must also be seen as a way to eliminate misconceptions we have of each other -- something that Star Academy has already done.

"I never knew what the Moroccan or Tunisian language was like," said Marwa Omar, political science student at AUC. "Plus I always thought that the people from the Gulf were very conservative and had no sense of humour, but when I watched the show I felt that they are young people who have dreams just like us."

The show therefore acts as a means of breaking down cultural misconceptions and rigid thinking instilled by social norms. "At first Mohamed Khalawi, the Saudi Arabian student, never mingled with the girls," explained Alaa. "However, by the end of the show he developed a strong friendship with Bahaa El-Kafy, the Tunisian student. It showed that if a girl wears revealing clothes it doesn't mean she's a bad person. I think it changed the way of thinking of the contestants, as well as that of the viewers."

The huge success of Star Academy has already prompted LBC to promise a sequel. Whether it will be as successful as the first, time can only tell. Fikry stresses that the producers of the show have to hype it up if they expect to attract the same number of viewers.

"People will become more demanding. What was once simple will become complicated," she explained. "However, we have to put in mind that ours is an Arab culture. We will never see one of the contestants having a shower, for example, as happens in some reality shows in the West. There's a limit to how far they can go."