What used to be so great is now utterly awful with the quality viewing experience of Come Dine With Me South Africa on BBC Entertainment (DStv 120) totally debased and crassly commercialised with irritating, intrusive and terrible on-screen crawl ads spoiling the watching.
Where the previous seasons of Come Dine with Me South Africa, the hit ITV Studios format produced by Rapid Blue for BBC Worldwide's BBC Entertainment on DStv, had classy restraint with in-show product placement which was at least functional and not overdone, it has now gone overboard and is spoiling it for viewers.
The latest third season of Come Dine with Me South Africa is now so commercially pandering by even adding stripped ads which completely detracts from the show, that is comes across as if BBC Worldwide and everyone else smelled money and is now just in it to mine the TV property at the expense of who really should matter: the ordinary viewer forced to watch this over commercialised show.
When you go to a classy restaurant, are there stripped adds all across the menu? Are you being confronted to look at brands on your wine glass and stickers on your knives and forks like Ariel washing powder trashing and trashing around just to get noticed irrespective of the impact and the detracting experience it has on your dining evening?
Why them is BBC Entertainment and Come Dine With Me South Africa filling the screen of the local third version with even more crass marketing trash this time around? It's so unbecoming of what used to be a good show. It lowbrows what used to be higher brow.
Do the people who book, excitedly decide, and then give money and get money for these things actually sit down and watch the total end product and how it's trashed up? You expect this hard-selling approach from something like a Tropika Island of Treasure Paradise we-will-run-a-show-with-a-dead-contestant and SABC1. Not from Come Dine With Me South Africa and the BBC.
Go mar your kid's kindergarden picture, your wedding photo, your car's windscreen or your own dining room table with garish banners and stickers and labels and see if you like it. Of course nobody will do that, yet somehow television and the viewing experience offered to pay-TV subscribers are seen as ripe territory to stuff down intrusive ads.
Why yet another local produced South African TV show must be made to look like an infomercial on-screen with pandering brands hoping to get noticed (and then ironically be rejected by viewers precisely because of that) is not clear. Why can't commercials be kept where they're supposed to be ... in the ad breaks between shows?
