Sunday night's Big Brother Titans finale was such a challenging exercise in managing patience and annoyance we almost rolled our eyes off our heads.
These were the only uplifting, entertaining things that happened:
1. Khosi Twala won. Yaydom! She deserved it. She tried her best to keep us watching and wore her heart on her sleeve.
2. Yvonne's underboob outfit - mesmerising. It was impossible to look anywhere else.
3. Meeting Khosi's buddy and Tsatsii's Little Brother and hearing what they had to say. They were shy and real and authentic.
The few minutes we got with them emphasised just how much we were missing out on because of the production refusing to share more of those moments.
Many of the housemates' families were at that Watch Party - we saw Khosi and Kanaga Jnr's family in the insert boxes just before Khosi won - and yet we weren't allowed to speak to them.
Same thing with the housemates who were
there. At first we thought they were watching from home, but no, riiiight at the very end there was a quick shot of them dancing at the party. Why weren't they on stage in the studio?! If some of the Nigerian housemates are already back in Naija, they should have been flown back.
The conceptualisation, structure and directing of the finale was poor, cheap, BAD TV. The interesting people were side-lined and the uninvolved ones, who had nothing to do with what we've been watching for the past 10 weeks, were given the spotlight.
Huge amounts of time was spent on the lip synched musical acts when it should have been spent on a Reunion Show, with the housemates on stage, reflecting on life outside the house, giving their impressions on who should win, entertaining us with side swipes.
The musicians and other intrusions upstaged those who were eliminated last too. The very people who'd spent the longest time on the show were given the least amount of airtime once they were evicted. Ipeleng and Ebubu hardly said two words before they were shoved off and yet the sponsors, oh no, that didn't happen with them.
They were given special interviews and attention in between the relentless adverts, rehashed advertiser tasks and constant plugs by Lawrence and Ebuka, suggesting that the real and only intention behind the series has been to get viewers to spend money with the sponsors.
Not only that, but to encourage the audience to gamble and to drink alcohol, emphasised through the tasks, Friday night games and Saturday night parties.
We don't want to be party poopers - we love a good party if there's one going - but both of those activities have the potential to be addictive and yet the show never shared warnings about this, only in the small print.
We've gone on about this through the season and it's because we believe it's so important to understand what's going on:
why does the show need so many invasive sponsors?
Subscribers are already paying to watch and there are adverts in between and yet it's as if this doesn't count. DStv can't be that
broke surely? The give/take ratio is totally out whack, with the production taking a
lot more than it's giving back.
All this completely changes the original intention behind the Big Brother format. It's supposed to be a social experiment that brings us face-to-camera with our humanity. With what makes people tick. The housemates' humanity, our humanity, social dynamics, everyone's personal and interpersonal struggles and realities, without them being glorified sales people.
At the heart of the format is a love (and loathing) of people, not a mission to sell products and companies, and the fact that it's become this means Big Brother is now an advertorial and not a TV show or cultural phenomenon anymore.
And if it is a cultural phenomenon, is it really what we want our culture to be?