Inday Badiday: 10 Fascinating Things About the 80s Queen of Intrigues

(SPOT.ph) One unexpected pop culture figure made a cameo this past week in the melodrama-slash-dark comedy that is politics in the Philippine Senate: entertainment journalist Inday Badiday, long known to industry insiders as “Ate Luds” and to consumers of Philippine entertainment talk shows from the ‘70s to the ‘90s as “the Queen of Intrigues.” Last Monday, during a heated debate after Senator Imee Marcos’ privilege speech accusing minority bloc senators of pushing for charter change, Senator Juan Miguel “Migz” Zubiri delivered an impassioned rebuttal slamming Marcos’ video presentation which he believed to have had an unsubstatiated and conspiratorial tone. “Inday Badiday na ba tayo dito sa Senado?" he said. "Kaya nga sinasabi na ‘We are a circus!’”

Long before there were Mariteses, there was Inday Badiday, the showbiz name of Maria Lourdes Jimenez Carvajal, born on August 6, 1944 in Misamis Oriental. She was one of nine children born to former Ambassador to Korea Narciso Jimenez and Maria Clara Vega. While the other seven siblings would eventually settle in the United States, the two remaining Jimenez kids would go on to leave their mark on the Philippine media ecosystem in indelible ways: one would grow up to be Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, beloved editor-in-chief of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. And Carvajal would go on to become a force in entertainment journalism, first hosting the TV program Nothing But the Truth in the late ‘70s and then breaking out through top-rated showbiz-oriented talk shows, the weekly See-True and the daily Eye-to-Eye, through the ‘80s into the ‘90s.

How Carvajal came to her showbiz moniker Inday Badiday is almost lost to the mists of apocrypha at this point. According to Esquire Philippines, a certain Lulu Reyes was quoted in an article saying that Carvajal landed on the name when she started her career as a radio host in the mid-1960s “to save her family from the potential embarrassment of being associated with such working-class proclivities as movie stars and Tagalog movies.” That tidbit points to the outdated snobbishness of Carvajal’s upper-middle-class upbringing towards local pop culture.

Over the course of four decades, Inday Badiday changed that mindset. Back in the days of a monoculture where people got their news and information from the same sources—TV, radio and print—See-True was a bonafide hit from Tondo to Forbes Park because, according to Inday Badiday, “siguro ayaw ng tao ‘yung pagdating sa bahay from the office ay tinuturuan pa sila.”

Inday Badiday continued working into the early 2000s, even through a kidney ailment diagnosed in 2002 that required her to undergo dialysis three times a week. But in 2003, she suffered two strokes that left her in a coma. On September 26, 2003, she succumbed to diabetes, renal failure and heart problems.

You don’t get a four-decade career and become a household name like Inday Badiday without dispensing a few bits of wisdom and throwing a few bombshells along the way. And perhaps inventing a catchphrase or two. Here are a bunch of things Gen Z might find "wild" about the woman Senator Zubiri namedropped in the heat of frustration in the middle of his rebuttal:

Inday Badiday immortalized her househelp through her question “Papasa ba ‘yan kay Tasing?”—the host’s litmus test for how easily digestible any item is to the mass audience. In her home network GMA, creatives and producers would eventually adopt it to evaluate the marketability of their work, although many had no idea where the expression originated. But Inday Badiday’s niece, the Emmy-nominated documentarian Kara Magsanoc-Alikpala, insists her aunt first coined the question.

Speaking of catchphrases, Inday Badiday accentuated every scoop and gossip item she unveiled on her shows with her trademark, “Careful careful!”, which was eventually developed into her program’s jaunty theme jingle. This could have been a pithy distillation of the advice she always used as sign-off for her daily radio program Inday ng Buhay Ko: “Bye for now. Mag-ingat ka sa mga taong hindi mo kilala. Mas lalo kang mag-ingat sa mga taong kilala mo na.” Think of it as the predecessor of today's "Think before you click."

Inday Badiday tried to maintain journalistic standards in her work, which is why her grandson IC Mendoza called out Migz Zubiri for namedropping her to cast aspersions on the Senate’s current penchant for staging made-up melodrama. But there was one notable instance where this “just the facts” philosophy could have been up for debate: During her daily show Eye-to-Eye, which now also included human interest and charity stories, Inday Badiday reported on the story of a woman who had allegedly given birth to a dalag—which she named Dyesebel (she believed it was a girl). The story so captivated the pop cultural imagination that writer Jerry Gracio turned it into a Palanca Award-winning short story and director Adolfo Alix, Jr. used it as inspiration for his 2011 Cinemalaya entry Isda (Fable of the Fish) starring Cherrie Pie Picache.

A momentous first: Kris Aquino, the youngest daughter of newly installed Philippine President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino after the EDSA Revolution, made her television debut in 1986 in Inday Badiday’s talk show See-True. It would pave the way for Kris' eventual entry to show business.

Wading through the scoops and gossip of showbiz, you will almost certainly be stung by controversy. During an appearance promoting her 1986 comedy Super Wan-Tu-Tri, a then-17-year-old Janice de Belen had religious groups up in arms when she tried to characterize the sanctity of her pregnancy with fellow 17-year-old Aga Muhlach with the words “God was with us when we did it” on Inday Badiday’s See-True. Aga defended the beleaguered Janice by insisting the pregnancy was not an accident, and the two maintain an amicable relationship as co-parents to their son, the chef Luigi Muhlach.

Even though their vocations led them to what observers would call widely divergent paths in the media ecosystem, the sisters Lourdes Jimenez Carvajal and Letty Jimenez Magsanoc were very close. Among Inday Badiday’s most prized mementos is a framed photo of the two siblings as children with a birthday note from Letty to Inday which reads: “A moment of joy from a vanished yesterday but suspended forever in memory... You are today the sum total of all those moments and of all the memories.” They were supposed to share hosting duties in a TV show called Too Match but it never made it out of the drawing board.

Long before he became the news anchor of TV Patrol and then the Vice-President of the Philippines, Noli de Castro got his start in television working in See-True as the show’s voice-over, passing on phoned-in questions from audiences watching at home. She referred to him then on national TV as “Noli Boy.”

Lost kids would find their way to the GMA 7 studios back in the day and Inday would give them precious airtime, engaging them in a quick banter, likely to ease their stress and tension while facing the cameras before they call on their guardians to pick them up. A constant query she had was "Kilala mo ba ako?"

Inday Badiday had a colorful love life. She was first a teenage bride to Ernie Carvajal in what she described to Ricky Lo as “an off-and-on marriage” which produced two kids: Dolly Ann and Ricky Boy. She then found “the love of her life,” the TV and film director Gene “Bo” Palomo. It is to him that she addressed her trademark sign-off to her shows “Saranghamnida, Bo” (“I love you, Bo” in Korean), also a nod to her father’s ambassadorship.

Migz Zubiri apologized to the family of Inday Badiday, calling his namedrop “a slip of the tongue” during a heated moment and acknowledging that her name should not have been invoked under such spurious circumstances. IC Mendoza accepted the apology and encouraged the senator to “keep fighting the good fight.”

Senator Panfilo “Ping” Lacson would take the argument further on social media. In a blunt post on X, Senator Lacson would characterize Inday Badiday as “a decent person,” and use this as stark counterpoint against Imee Marcos’ allegations: “Peke ang source, peke ang messenger, pati ang back-up peke.”

Which leads us to one more piece of advice from Inday Badiday which is sorely needed in this blighted era of fake news and deepfake videos: “There is no need to invent news. You just have to dig deeper, and there’s always a gem out there waiting to be found.”