For the first time, anyone who did not watch the 2015 Vodafone Ghana Music Awards has a reason to rejoice over those who spent over 6 hours of their precious time watching ‘bollocks” on TV—it cannot get any lower and shameful than this.
If you thought some part of last year’s event was bad—then the entire event this year was worse. Those of us who did not have any choice than to watch it for over 6 hours can certainly head to the International Court of Justice and slay Charter House and their partners for “torture, inhumane and degrading treatment”.
On a serious note, the coordination out there and the broadcast was a total disaster. Let me tell you how bad it was. One hour into it, GhanaCelebrities.Com had over 11,000 people watching it at a particular minute on our page and as it got bad and proceeded to worse, viewers dropped to about 600 people. Surely, many people watching the live stream which was the worst I have ever seen realized this is not the way to spend a Saturday night. We changed streaming from GTV to Star Beer’s Youtube live streaming, but the quality was the same.
If we call this an industry award being produced or organised this way in 2015, then it’s a clear reflection of the sort of ‘thing’ we call a music industry in Ghana—-no organisation, no rules, co-ordination, bad sound quality just like the many rushed-through Ghanaian songs being ‘churned out’ daily and the picture quality was astronomically terrible.
I hate to do this but I cannot let it go without drawing a necessary production comparison. Just last month, I was one of the many people who had the opportunity to attend the first LIVE broadcast of this year’s UK’s popular TV show-The Voice, and apart from the joy of having Rita Ora, Will.i.am, Sir Tom Jones and Ricky Wilson seated a few meters away from me—I came home asking myself this simple question; how are these people able to manage such a high quality production for live TV with this level of speed and high accuracy?
Surely, The Voice is produced for the BBC which means you wouldn’t be seeing any eye-hurting pictures from the broadcast but from the stage design to lighting, yesterday confirmed that we are billions of light years behind in such things.
Even common time management was a disaster for our biggest Award show which dragged on for over 6 hours after a late start, yet The Voice which I attended and had almost the same number of performing artistes like we had yesterday was able to run 12 performances from the contestants with another from the coaches and Olly Murs within 2 hours—and it all went well.