by Thinus Ferreira
Horrific is a strong word to use but that - together with unprofessional, an amateurish mess, and a gun and violence-drenched disaster - is exactly what MultiChoice and M-Net's disgusting and extremely off-putting 11th Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards on DStv was on Saturday night.
Similar to previous years, the mistake-riddled and shoddily run and made live awards show from the Eko Hotel & Suites in Lagos, Nigeria was a spectacular shocker in "let's play awards show" TV mimickry.
With the embarrassing display, MultiChoice and M-Net shamelessly shamed the continent's film and TV industry with what can only be called utter television trash.
It's difficult to fathom why MultiChoice and M-Net continue to televise disastrous and degrading awards show garbage like the AMVCAs when it is abundantly clear that the pay-TV company has neither the willingness, nor capacity and skill to even remotely do this as an awards show, or to broadcast it properly live across Africa on DStv.
Saturday night's 11th Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards was a breathless, disgusting, unsalvageable television disaster, with MultiChoice and M-Net shrugging along as if nothing's wrong, the standard is adequate, and everything's fine.
It's not by a longshot.
From mistake after mistake, and from egregious error to error, MultiChoice Nigeria's 11th AMVCA was a shocking TV travesty.
Low-class crap like this doesn't belong on television and MultiChoice and M-Net should be extremely ashamed and embarrassed about staging an inept production like this and broadcasting something looking like - and being done in the way of the 11th AMVCAs - of Saturday night.
This type of trash makes Africa's television and film look like incompetent also-trys.
Purportedly an awards show there to showcase the best and prestigious skills and competencies of the continent's film fraternity, MultiChoice and M-Net once again staged the Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards in such horrific fashion on DStv that it turned itself and what it is showcasing, into a decrepit laughing-stock.
Shame on MultiChoice.
Is this "fine" because "oh, it's 'just' Africa" and "we don't know better, don't care, can't do better and nobody will see it"?
Is this okay because "oh, it's just the best of what we're capable of, don't judge us for being inferior and not being able to maintain or have or reach basic or higher standards?"
Is that the mentality? Is that the approach? I refuse to accept that.
Why is MultiChoice Nigeria CEO John Ugbe, Busola Tejumola, MultiChoice's head of content and channels for West Africa, Victor Sanchez Aghahowa, head of production for West Africa, and Segilola Aboaba-Olunaike, senior manager for production in West Africa, all seemingly fine with this failure-grade production, or if they're not, unable to fix it?
The shockingly shoddy production values of MultiChoice and M-Net's 11th Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards reeked of blustering incompetence as a TV trainwreck that just kept slamming forward from disaster to disaster, to disaster, with no semblance of professionalism.
A while into Saturday's 11th AMVCA trashcast, came the realisation: Someone decided to turn the 11th Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards into a blood-soaked, nasty, downright disgusting violence, gun, murder and physical assault-filled show.
It's as if somebody decided to scan through all of the content nominated, culling the worst of the worst to then show throughout the night: Every single gunshot, murder, gender-violence scene, stabbing, blood-letting-spattering and torture scene available.
This got served up for DStv subscribers tuning in to a supposedly "dignified" and "stylish" awards show. The cognitive celluloid dissonance on tasteless display was shocking.
Once again: MultiChoice either didn't know and didn't care.
Or MultiChoice and M-Net were aware and okay'ed this, or were aware and were impotent to change anything.
For whatever reason, MultiChoice and M-Net chose a film awards show to subject DStv viewers - with only a wholly inadequate 13-age restriction - to a never-ending barrage over three hours of gruesome scenes of people getting stabbed, women strangled, people thrown from balconies, tortured in terrifying ways, shot and blood exploding from their bodies.
This made MultiChoice and M-Net's 11th Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards the most violent, vile and disgusting one yet. And someone did that deliberately. These clips were chosen.
The result? Turning the 11th AMVCAs into a B-grade snuff movie and making Africa's film biz output look like low-class killer content.
These are just a few examples of what MultiChoice and M-Net showed DStv subscribers during the 11th AMVCAs - it's by no means exhaustive.
I thought I'd go and count the AMVCA guns, knives and killings depicted - obviously a new record - in everything from hostage situations to murders and revenge killings - but it quickly became too much. There was one electric chainsaw.
How exactly does picking and showing lurid and disgusting scenes of violence, guns, shootings, stabbings, murder, strangling, physical assault and gender-violence against women "showcase" the best work from nominees and filmmakers?
Why the seemingly absolute obsession with showing every conceivable gun clip and characters constantly being threatened and being terrified? Is that the style, atmosphere and "image" MultiChoice and M-Net want to imbue the 11th AMVCAs with as an awards show?
For DStv subscribers to look away? For DStv subscribers to switch off or to tune away to another channel?
Is clipping violence for insertion into an awards show the best that can possibly be done, production-wise, to show "drama" or that work supposedly has "artistic" merit?
The vast majority of these clips and scenes didn't even fit with the nominee categories - so why the avalanche of inappropriate violent trash ripped from work to run as category nominee playouts?
How does an ordinary DStv subscriber - paying for this - watch three hours of this
Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards trash and not be traumatised by it and the amateurish fail-after-fail knock-on presentation?
Once again it's very clear that nobody photenically briefed category presenters or sent them voicenotes on how to properly pronounce nominees and winners' names beforehand.
Several presenters on stage looked embarrassed reading names that they clearly suspected they're mangling, and many botched names. Some indicated they didn't want to read the names. Even the voice-over announcer mangled names.
Speaking of him - a sarcastic IK Osakioduwa didn't hide his disdain from the in-auditorium audience nor his co-host David Oke this year as part of his off-putting shtick.
Meanwhile, the camera once again panned over empty seats, showed people milling about and the production was once again unable to do basic spell-checks or quality control on even the very few "wosrds" put on screen.
Clearwater was responsible for the graphics and insert creation.
Marred by sound problems throughout three hours (as usual), including stage mic and handheld mic mistakes and sound desk mute button errors, someone also had the terrible idea to add a mechanical parrot that squawked winners off stage.
The 11th AMVCAs suffered from the usual bad lighting design, a bad-looking stage with what looked like a badly done black tarp-backdrop, while the presentation of entire categories were botched and one had to be done over, while people struggled to read, together with obvious autocue and other mistakes and errors.
Incredibly, sponsors like Martell, Heineken, Indomie, Nivea, MTN and other companies that attached their names to this mediocre spectacle also either don't care, or don't ever watch and see how bad their brands look alongside shoddy content.
The credit roll of MultiChoice and M-Net's 11th Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards lists Ikechi Nwauzor as event manager, Evi Odafe-Ejumedia as project manager, Boluwatife Awoyemi as sound engineer, Warren Bleksley as TV director, Tamara Downing as producer, Segilola Aboaba-Olunaike as production team lead, with Darren Hayward as showrunner.
MultiChoice and M-Net should stop doing the AMVCAs as an award show and as a live award show on DStv if it can't or isn't willing to do it right.
This TV trash damages their brands and damages the image of what Africa's vibrant (and much better) television and film industry really is.