Once upon a time a little girl from a small southern town had – like hero Martin Luther King before her – a dream. That dream was to give the lost, the disenfranchised, the everyday men and women of her native US of A what she herself had longed for and found – a voice. As a young girl growing up, first in rural Mississippi, then inner-city Milwaukee, she had seen poverty and hardship (rape, juvenile detention, teenage pregnancy), but determination, passion and empathy had allowed her to find her way out of the darkness and into the light. It was the empathy that was key – Oprah Winfrey (for it is she of whom we speak) did empathy like no one else.
It is strongly attested that Ms Winfrey was single-handedly responsible for the confessional culture that pervaded late-20th century Western media – this is the woman who inspired confidence and confidences with dewy-eyed aplomb, made us all aware that ‘lightbulb moments’ (the instant when we suddenly ‘get’ issues that have for so long been obscured) were the key to personal awakening and that there is no better reward in life than uncovering – and staying true to – your ‘authentic self’.
Right from the start, Oprah (surnames quickly become superfluous when you’re a media mogul par excellence and the world’s only black billionaire, as she once had the privilege of being) was a champion of people and causes, merrily spreading her love and success like the mass-media equivalent of a group hug. With her show syndicated to over 140 countries worldwide, the Oprah touch is such that it would put King Midas to shame – an invitation onto her famous book club alone became the literary equivalent of winning the lottery, so quickly did sales multiply for its featured authors.
Rather more dubiously, our heroine has long been enamoured with the nether reaches of self-improvement and self-help, calling upon gurus in everything from weight-loss to personal development to pitch their messages of hope from her stage, making Warhol-style 15-minute celebrities of them all.
The ultimate prize, however, comes in the form of your very own Oprah-endorsed show. Dr Phil McGraw was famously thrumming his fingers in private practice before Oprah sprinkled fairy dust over his no-nonsense, tough love approach to relationship issues. After becoming a firm favourite on her show, he was granted one of his own through Harpo (Winfrey’s production company), imaginatively titled (and the sharp-eyed among you will notice a theme developing here) Dr Phil.
Celebrity chef Rachael Ray enjoyed a similar fate. The wide-mouthed Italian-American may well have been doing very nicely thank you with slots on the Today show and Food Network. But it wasn’t until Oprah took her under her wing and heralded the Harpo-produced launch of tea-time cookery-cum-talk show Rachael Ray in 2006, with a frenzy of appearances on Oprah, that Ray’s star went stratospheric. Both have gone on to be syndicated around the world (including here in the UAE where they form a five-night-a-week triumvirate on free-to-air channel MBC4) making, one can only imagine, seven-figure stars of their hosts.
Honestly, you think they’d be grateful. But, as so often happens in such cases, there has been some much-rumoured biting of the hand that feeds.
Gayle King, Oprah’s best friend (who has also, naturally, been granted the gift of media with an editorship role on O magazine and regular appearances on her bessie mate’s show after the Harpo-endorsed The Gayle King Show failed to ignite the small screen) made a special appearance on a US edition of Rachael Ray earlier this year in a bid to quell rumblings of disaffection between the two: What had begun with leaked news of a racial slur from Ray dating back to 2005 culminated with a ‘You make me sick’-style spat reported on the front page of esteemed US weekly the National Enquirer back in April.Dr Phil, meanwhile, is rumoured to be ‘ungrateful’ of his esteemed mentor, although the lady herself is far too dignified to publicly confirm or deny such opinions.
We here at Time Out, however, are amused to discover that Oprah’s latest pet project, featuring her favourite on-show medic, the cloying Dr Oz (or ‘America’s Doctor’ as the lady herself calls him) in his own dedicated show, was trumped to air by none other than the Dr Phil McGraw-produced Doctors – a talk show-style medical advisory that has also been snaffled for UAE audiences and is currently being aired, with sweet irony, between Dr Phil and Oprah on MBC4.
Such ingratitude, if it’s true, must surely rankle, but for the formerly abused juvenile delinquent-turned-‘most influential woman in the world’ (according to CNN, Time.com and American Spectator)? We reckon she’s got it covered.
Rachael Ray, Dr Phil, Doctors and Oprah, Sat-Wed, MBC4
