No, I haven’t made a mistake: I didn’t mean to write “As Christmas Approaches”!
I really am more interested in what I remember of the days of happy-go-lucky Christmas holidays of yesteryear than I am of the “ADVERTISERS’ BOOM-TIME” that passes for Yuletide these days.
But really, this is quite serious: why have our media practitioners allowed advertisers to take over their operations so completely? Once, it was like this: “This is MY advertising spot. If you want it, this is what you’ll get.” Today, however, the setup seems to be: “This is my advertising budget. If you want it, you have to do A,B,C and add D on top of it!” The buyer dictates. And the seller accepts it or lumps it.
SCENARIO: I am watching a very serious discussion on our nation’s affairs on Joy TV. In mid-sentence, repeat mid-sentence, the presenter is interrupted by an advertisement.
Is it because the technicians producing the Show are incapable of pressing their buttons at the appropriate time, or is it because they DO NOT CARE whether the viewer would lose the train of thought being pursued, by the time the ad completes delivering its message?
Or is it that management has agreed to advertiser’s demands that speakers be interrupted with ads. especially at ‘controversial moments’ in the programme?
JOY and all those who do the same thing – please be advised that you are not the only station that needs advertising revenue to stay in operation. Before your owners knew what a TV set looked like, great TV stations like NBC, ABC and CBS (in the USA) and ITV, Channel 4 and SKY (in the UK) were also mediating the need for advertising revenue against the absolute primacy of editorial content. They all macer to the conclusion that editorial matter should not be interrupted, EXCEPT DURING ADVERTISING ‘BREAKS’, or SEGMENTS, during which adverts CAN be grouped together and delivered to viewers, seg-pause by seg-pause.
Strategically=segmented Ad breaks actually serve both viewers and producers alike. Viewers can (say) go to the bathroom and come back to be able still to see (say) JR produce his cynical smile in Dallas, or some other show in which even a mere facial expression cannot be missed, because it is worth hundreds of words to the story-line. Ads and editorial SIMPLY DON’T MIX!
And there are Broadcasting Standards Control Boards set up specifically to ensure that such rules are not broken. Where are such institutions in Ghana? They only exist in name, it appears. For the actual output of our TV stations suggests that the stations can get away with whatever they like, by way of attracting revenue from ads.
Another taboo they break is the unnecessarily-long listing of sponsors to a programme: the presenter’s eyelashes were done by Company C, which procured its blue-ash colour from Company X, while the shoes were flown in specially by Company F and the fake finger-nails were supplied by Company Long-Tooth. Gee!
The advertisers themselves are to blame, to some extent. It’s true that exposure of any sort is good for sales. But I am certain that if the advertising agencies
operating here took a minute to study the history of advertising practices in New York (say), they would realise that one of the major principles of the successful business prevalent in those quarters has always been, “DO NOT ANTAGONISE THE TARGET AUDIENCE!” In some of the programmes with “low-IQ” audiences (such as game shows) it may not matter where ads are placed.
But an A-B audience listening to a Government official deliver an authoritative message about (say) Covid-19 will definitely be angered by a silly ad extolling the virtues of (say) a certain irrelevant medication. In other words, institutions set up with public funds to act as upholders of standards, please do your work. And Ministries operating with public funds for the public good, please supervise the boards you set up and press them hard to fulfil the expectations that made you set them up.
I said I was more interested in telling you about past Yuletide seasons, but see what the need to save our sanity from the unprofessional money-reapers has made me do. Yes, the Christmas Holidays were extremely special to those of us who were in school during the colonial days or shortly afterwards.
To begin with, the holidays were the only time we could really relate to our parents. We got up in the morning, put on old clothes, and followed our mother and father, in the company of our brothers and sisters and sometimes members of our extended families, to go and work on our family farms. We worked hard, because we wanted to please our parents well, before Christmas came.
Usually, we would farm on a newly-cleared area of the virgin forest. We would gather tree trunks (according to size) and pile them together to be burnt. When the fires died down, we would spread the ash evenly all along the cleared areas,
. Then we would go home, to return to the farm. After it had rained.
To work on a newly-burnt farm which has been rained upon, is one of the most
delightful chores in the world. The scent on the farm, produced by the ashes, rotten-drying leaves and tree branches, and the disturbed fungi beneath the soil – the admixture of chemical processes gave out a scent never to be found anywhere else.
And then, we would witness Nature at work – cocoyam tubers would spring out spontaneously drom the burnt earth; so would delicious mushrooms of different sizes and shapes. We would intersperse these self-growing vegetations with plantains, yams and vegetables, whose “seedlings” we would have deliberately brought over from an older farm. And we would watch them all grow together! Working with Nature thus to ensure our survival turned hard work into a creative process the like of which it is difficult to find anywhere else except on a farm.
Depending on how good the price of the cocoa was that particular season – cocoa which our parents would have planted in other, specialised farms maybe long before we were born – we would be bought new clothes for Christmas. These new clothes always smelt absolutely heavenly , and we would try hard to use them sparingly, so as not to erase that nice, ”newly-minted” smell.
Again, depending on how good the cocoa prices had been, we might be given cash for pocket-money – to be used in buying toffee, chewing gum and toy guns.
To be able to buy a girl on whom one entertained romantic designs, a nice box containing a mixture of sweets, gave one a feeling of immense joy. One would then wait patiently for midnight on “24thNight” to arrive for one to collect one’s reward! One needed, usually, to buy a bottle of “Portello” (a popular ladies’ soft drink) to seal the love-pact.
No one who had any idea of how to enjoy life went to bed before 2-3 a.m. on “24th Night”.
Everyone stayed on the streets, making noise. Any noise!
We beat drums.
We used tins as musical instruments of all sorts.
Above all, we filled the air with bangs! – the sound of toy-guns, “rockets” (mini-”fireworks”) and – terribly unmelodic singing.
We were in heaven on earth!
And it’s almost all gone now!
By CAMERON DUODU
