You remember Tom Jakobek, the former Toronto councillor and mayoral wannabe?
Got caught lying. Left under a cloud of scandal. Tried to salvage a destroyed rep by taking a shot at the mayor’s job. Got barely 2,300 votes and was banished, or so we thought, to a life of obscurity.
Jacko’s making a comeback April 28 on Spoiled Rotten, the unreality TV show on SLICE, the “guilty pleasures” network whose roster of mind-numbing drama (?) includes Bulging Brides and Canada’s Next Top Model.
Somewhere along the line, Jacko’s journey into anonymity took an epiphanic turn. The pol come real estate promoter looked into the mirror. His reflection, the curls a little thinner, the face gaunter, stared back, glazed. He didn’t like what he’d become.
More precisely, he didn’t like what his kids had become. The four teens he’d raised in the lap of luxury – $350 jeans for the boys, $150 an ounce perfume from Paris for the girls, four vacations a year – needed to be taught a lesson about the value of hard work. Deep breath while we take in camera panning tastefully decorated Beaches manse, projection screen in living room, basement games room, etc… Papa Tom’s worried living la vida loca in the rarified air of privilege has caused them to lose touch with, well, reality. Pretty rich stuff considering Jacko ran as fast as he could from his working class roots as soon as he saw the chance to marry into big money. But we digress.
Enter Temple Street Productions with just the “challenge” to teach the brats a lesson – a weekend scrubbing toilets, shoveling snow, and bussing tables at the Horsehoe Valley resort. And what do we learn from this revealing look at Swiss family Jakobek? That Tom’s as bossy as ever. The bureaucrats he bullied for years at City Hall could tell you that. But that’s another story, from another time.
Crazy to think this bit of shameless self-promotion is some twisted attempt by Jacko to rehab his image for another run at public office. Maybe this was his way of doing public penance for his past political sins. Quite the come down for someone called an “audaciously slippery operator” by the judge overseeing the inquiry into the biggest corruption scandal in the city’s history.
Maybe Jacko’s just bored. Oh the vanity. Fade to black. Roll credits. The family lives happily ever after.
