How to say this: The 2018 Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards held for the 6th time on Victoria Island in Lagos, Nigeria on Saturday night wasn't a great award show broadcast on the Africa Magic channels, nor was it good or got a passing grade - but it was less bad than previously, so in that sense was an improvement on the previous 5 years.
The amateurish broadcast of the 2018 Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards with Nadia White as director and executive produced by Kayode Gbenga had less mistakes than in all previous years but this is still not how a so-called pan-African awards show - honouring and being about the best in film and TV no less - should look on television.
Saturday night's three and a quarter hour broadcast on the Africa Magic channels across MultiChoice's DStv satellite pay-TV platform had a smoother flow; had more functional pacing that was good, and had a beautiful, world class, gold-and-white audio-visual theme that employed a little director's chair, camera, film rolls and the Africa Magic logo as a button, to great effect.
Julius Oluwadamilare and Peter Obie were responsible for the motion graphics.
Unfortunately the rest was again trash, although there were less trash.
Viewers were not shown empty seats like in the past.
Viewers didn't see late winners storm the stage doing acceptance speeches. Winners this year who went over their time unceremoniously got their mics cut and the camera switching back to one of the hosts to introduce a new category (bad and disruptive yes, but not as bad as rambling people not knowing when to stop).
When Ngozi Obasi for instance simply didn't want to stop talking after winning Best costume designer, despite the music rising louder to drown her out and play her off, producers abruptly cut her mic and switched to IK Osakioduwa who then cut to an ad break.
Sound problems and audio level mistakes - especially with the muting and unmuting of Minnie Dlamini Jones' mic - cropped up throughout the night, with Ayo Adeife who was responsible for sound overall as the audio supervisorm and with Kumle Akintayo as head sound engineer.
The cue-in and cue-out timing between category nominee AVs playing and category presenters talking, were wrong all night - with viewers who missed a lot of words and sentences during the switching between stage-live and play-AV because producers didn't do anything to improve initial mistakes and to correct the playout lag.
The stage design done by Equally Diverse Solutions looked shockingly dull, cheap, unimaginative, plain and unbecoming of an African awards show such as what the Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards tries to be.
The golden arches against the back wall were chipped, incredibly dented and scratched, and this showed up highly visible on screen throughout the night.
It gave the 2018 Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards a constant second-hand on-screen look. Wasn't this supposed to be newly built? Was this a re-use and redress from other Africa Magic shows? It was shoddy and looked trashy.
If you can't bring out proper set silverware for supposedly the year's biggest televised showcase event on Africa Magic, what can M-Net bring it out for?
The 2018 Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards is supposed to be a pan-African awards show, so a specifically Nigerian message didn't really make sense, but it didn't detract from the broadcast.
The In Memoriam segment was once again very bad and again omitted several names across Africa that should have been included.
The producers couldn't bother to actually include pictures of those who died - in an awards show about TV and film as visual mediums, and broadcast on television where you need to show viewers things.
The inclusion of a live orchestral band - with very bad sound (did anybody do a sound and level check beforehand?) was bad because of the lack of proper mics to capture the surround sound.
The result? The orchestra sounded off (and small) - which wasn't their fault.
The inclusion of a random operatic performance was odd and completely out-of-place for a show like this. Nothing against opera, but the 2018 Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards isn't the appropriate place to insert an aria.
The sexist IK Osakioduwa was back with more lame, one-note jokes all along the theme of him lusting after women he can't have sex with, and saying things like he wants to be a rapper so he could be surrounded by irresponsible girls.
Why people like Wangi Mba-Uzoukwu, M-Net West Africa director, keep condoning his behaviour and keep hiring him back to spout this trash remarks that don't belong in Africa's entertainment industry is shocking and inexplicable.
Didn't he have a script that he had to study and keep to? And if he had a script and this was in there, who okay'ed this and though it was acceptable?
The awards show finished on time at 23:15, when it should have - an improvement on the past.
The on-stage lighting was mistakenly switched off several times with Minnie Dlamini Jones and IK Osakioduwa literally standing in the dark, especially towards the end, and having to talk, visible only as silhouettes.
Why does it remain so difficult for M-Net and Africa Magic to broadcast a passing grade and half decent awards show?
If Nigeria doesn't have the required technical talent to pull of an awards show of this scale that comes with certain visual, audio, floor, stage and other planning challenges, why not fly in experienced production people from elsewhere for the Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards to help and do it if so many other people are already being flown in?
Pan-African viewers deserve better than what the 2018 Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards showed, although it was the "best" one out of the bad of the past 6 years. Hopefully the still not quite there production values will continue to improve.
