A snapshot of Sunday's live show
No, just NO! The boring, badly produced drivel that DStv offered up on Sunday night's live Big Brother Titans eviction show is not nearly good enough for what subscribers are paying.
It's
not okay, especially when you add the cost of data, which we had to use to watch because of loadshedding.
Sitting in the dark, we kept getting notifications from Vodacom about urgently depleting data while suffering through the endless non-event of the show which offered no entertainment whatsoever.
We paid for nothing because NOTHING happened for the full hour.
There was no reality interpretation of the narrative, the housemates sulked and refused to answer questions, the questions sucked they were so uninteresting, and there was no Ebuka and no eviction, which we already knew mid-way through.
By 20h40 it was clear it wasn't happening because there wasn't enough time for exit interviews and yet they insisted on dragging out the non-existent tension by getting the housemates to stand up and down continuously, to a backdrop of silence.
The timing was so poorly produced and directed it went on and
on with that undynamic background music and those long, laboured pauses from Lawrence. For what?! Those extended pauses are always a problem but this week it was a gobsmackingly huge problem which emphasised how bad the show's timing is.
Last week we revealed how the 10-second exit countdown actually goes on for double the time. If we had the time or inclination this week we'd go through the latest episode to see how little talking there was throughout.
We don't have the time to do it after wasting so much of it on Sunday but we wouldn't be surprised if there was silence through half the show!
All that time they waste talking about the advertisers after the adbreaks and the Twitter comments - it's a waste that offers nothing.
Overall there's a massive amount of time squandered on distractions that actually have nothing to do with the show.
The production clearly doesn't want to spend money on taking cameras out into the world to get updates on the former housemates or join viewing parties or do other fun, interesting things around the culture of Big Brother but that's no excuse not to entertain us.
They could do it all through the footage they already have if they focused on the reality narrative of what happened during the week - they need to give us good storylines.
They need to make observations through the editing and voiceovers and really create plots and tensions and narratives but all they do is focus on who's into who, vaguely - they don't even always make the ins and outs clear.
Also, they've made no attempt to pivot by catering to audiences who are suffering through loadshedding.
They presume that everyone who's watching the Sunday night show is watching the live feed on a very regular basis, which is impossible for many South Africans who are grappling with timing their lives around the availability of electricity.
The Sunday night show needs to cater to this by bringing audiences jam packed and delightful coverage of the series that uplifts the spirit.
Sunday's show was completely joyless. The housemates are taking things so seriously there wasn't a smile amongst them and the laboured timing of every aspect was just so bleh it drove us to drink.
A total waste of time and money and extremely unfair on viewers.