by Thinus Ferreira
The 17th season of Idols on Mzansi Magic (DStv 161) will have a female winner again, with the long-running reality singing competition that marked another first-ever footnote on Sunday night for the South African version when the top three remaining contestants were announced and are all women.
Karabo Mathe from Hebron in the North-West, Berry (Berenike Trytsman) from Cape Town and S'22 Kile (S'thuthukile Langa) from Pietermaritzburg mark a historic trio as the first time in the history of Idols that the top three contestants are all female.
It's also the first time that two of the top three contestants are returnees to the Idols stage: Berry and Karabo both had a previous journey with Idols but were eliminated before they managed to reach the stage of the weekly Sunday live shows.
On Sunday night Kevin Maduna from Soweto got eliminated after receiving the least number of votes out of the 8 million votes that were cast for the top four contestants last week.
The top three contestants are flying to Cape Town this week and will spend the week in the Mother City where they will be recording their various first singles with Kalawa Jazmee Records before returning to Johannesburg for Sunday's next live show.
On Sunday 14 November DStv subscribers will find out which two contestants will be competing in the season 17 Idols finale which is set for 21 November.
The 17th season of Idols is far off from its former ratings dominance in previous seasons with hundreds of thousands of DStv subscribers who have jettisoned the [SIC] Entertainment produced show done for M-Net's Mzansi Magic channel.
The Idols ratings slide followed immediately after lurid media headlines and revelations of an alleged violent physical abuse scandal involving socialite Somizi Mhlongo who left the show as one of the three Idols judges earlier this season.
Idols that perenially used to rank first in previous seasons as the most-watched show on MultiChoice's DStv service during the broadcast of in-season episodes, pulled only 709 655 viewers at most in September as the 9th most-watched DStv series after it shed hundreds of thousands of viewers.
ALSO READ: South Africa TV ratings: September 2021.
