Whatever happened to the TV Star

By Tony Mochama

As the Standard Group unfurls a new logo ‘bringing the world to you’ in a white domed parlour hall (adorned with coloured aquarium fish in a finite glass world), I stand next to a now-near local television legend, Njoroge Mwaura; and the opening lyrics of that old Buggles pop-rock song occur to me: I heard you on the wireless back in fifty two/ lying awake intent on tuning into you.

Except that, it wasn’t wireless, it was KTN television. It wasn’t ‘fifty two’, it was 1992. But yes, we were always intent to tune into the news with the then two-part team of Catherine Kasavuli and Njoroge Mwaura, who enjoyed a cult-like following.

Familiarity

Maybe, as TV personality and prose humour writer PJ Rourke explains in his book The CEO of the Sofa, when one spends a lot of time in front of the tube (TV) thus becoming some type of tsar of the couch, TV presenters begin to be very familiar figures – visual buddies almost, like we know them. Yet like the gods and goddesses of Olympus, they are at an ‘elevated level.’ Only instead of being separated by sky, they are split away from us by screen.

For example, for this writer, no morning feels complete without a watching of the Anderson Cooper 360 show on CNN, followed by a 30 minute viewing of the local ‘Sunrise’ shows, all this before breakfast, the shower or even the morning papers.

" If he poured his heart into a glass, and offered it like wine, she could drink and be back in time for the morning papers!" says Prince in The Morning paper single. For many a news-watcher, whether spectacles-free or eyes framed in pince-nez, the next best thing by way of fantasy is the girl on TV – whether she is reading news, or just (mis) predicting the weather.

Clay Muganda, a journalist of long-standing and long-term critic of TV "boys and girls" stridently disagrees. As we sit at a Nairobi Restaurant, Clay says with a mock pout that sprouts into a mischievous grin: " If like Dennis Onyango (at the Prime Minister’s office) you stayed and studied in the USA for three years, and still came back with a distinct nasal twinge of Dholuo in your tone, why then should some TV personality who went for a one week conference in London then return with a British accent?" Clay then goes on to knock the ‘mid-Atlantic’ accents of too many of the newsreaders, as well as reporters, on TV.

"On CNN, BBC or even Al Jazeera, you are likely to hear American, Spanish , Aussie, Italian and a myriad other of dialect accents. So on Kenya television, I also expect to hear Kisii, Kalenjin, Maasai and even Indian intonations, and why not?" ask Clay.

Well, not just on voice but on visuals too do many of the TV folk get it all wrong. While wardrobe malfunctions are rare, some viewers sit and stare aghast at some bad hair or outfits occasionally worn by some misinformed TV persona – and many women cannot resist making catty comments on the same. "Kwani with all that money they make, they cannot get a good hair-do?" a lady will complain, in a way reminiscent over the storm of ‘worst dressed women’ in Kenya polls. These polls regularly throws up some of the most prominent women in the land – big head gear or really bad wig day included.

Fashion

A fashionista we’ll call Christie is unsparing on the trend of off-dressed TV people: "There are so many fashion editors within these media institutions, and for a small fee, they can be consulted on dress and make-up, for all these TV personalities, whether veterans or interns." Christie says her current worst dressed TV personality is "a young man who puts on way too much make-up, tweezes his brows, and the brother comes across as a little gay." That’s not who you want to see at the start of your day.

Says Clay: " While people like Zain Verjee did the hustle and women like Christine Amanpour have poured heart and soul into the art of television reportage, too many young people these days think TV is an easy way into fame and fortune. They say, "I have a pretty face, fine figure and heart-stopping smile. TV celebrity-dom, here I come!’ yet they couldn’t be more wrong!"

Then there is the lot that is mesmerized by the tele-prompters, and if by some accident it got stuck or something, they would be caught in a "duh duh" trance.

Clay gives a derisive snort: "I blame it partially on the media companies who save on resources by not having some sort of television sub-editors to go over content. But most reporters who rush out of the field and cut content then rush it on screen do a good job, going by the high quality of news and reportage Kenyans get. But the language, the misuse of metaphor and over-abundance of clichÈ, waaaahh, that’s another matter." As for people who will not peruse the morning papers before ‘reviewing’ them live on air, that’s a mystery of TV neither paper nor air.

The Buggles bugle their way in paraphrase: They took the credit for your symphony, rewritten in machines and new technology, now I understand the problems you face and see.

If there is one thing the paparazzi and new magazines like Pulse have done for the TV celebrity (the first one off the line was Jimmi Gathu in the early-1990s), it is to make their lives as stars red hot as they face the hurricanes of visual celebrity.

Celebrity

Yet stars are hot gaseous bodies, just like many TV folk who talk hot air in vacuous spaces (all exceptions noted, and knowing themselves) and who, furthermore, occupy a special place in the public imagination.

A prominent PR damsel explains: "For too many politicians these days, the TV girls have come to be seen as the ultimate trophy to have – alongside the nice car and a palatial house, nothing says ‘arriviste’ for the politician as a beautiful clande, who works in TV."

Going by the many scandals involving television lasses and prominent politicians that occupied the gossip pages most of last year (before international sport personalities and local musicians reclaimed their wrongful spot as transgressors numero uno), the PR lady’s assertion will rarely a surprise.

What comes to mind is yet more Buggles going – In my mind, and in my car, we can’t re-wind, we’ve gone too far. The pictures came, and broke your heart; put the blame on VCR!

And we have gone full circle with TV critic Clay, and the Arunga saga being the ghost that will not rest , Clay now talks of the hubris of television: The main problem with TV, I guess, is that image really is almost everything. Knowledge is put on the back-burner, make-up on the front, people are put on pedestals (the lady had a ‘Esther is a goddess’ Facebook page among younger fans for a while) and when one cannot live up to all the attention and has a ‘Hollywood style melt-down,’ it is more fodder for the cannon.

Even veteran media commentator Jerry Okungu admitted that, for once in Kenya’s ‘new media history’ recently on the blogs, even as a popular politician had 140 blog hits on his return to the country, Esther’s virtual home (since taken down) had over 20,000 virtual visitors in a single day, asking "wazzup?"

Great reporters

Yet great young reporters like KTN’s Mohammed Ali, as well as anchor-reporter John Allan Namu, continue to set high standards, away from the fluff that we all love. And we continue a strange addiction to TV news, and its reporters (even more than newsmakers, sometimes) continuing to fascinate Kenyans of all walks of life. For example on this evening at 9pm, instead of watching Monday Night Football, the few patrons at the restaurant demand that "the news be put on" in a bar habit that is peculiarly Kenyan – watching the news in the pub! Now, that’s new.

As we drive home the car is set on an FM radio, but my mind is on television and that old Buggles’ song (nothing new there either) the part that goes:

We met in an abandoned TV studio, we hear the playback, it seems so long ago, you remember the jingles... and we are still thinking – really, who killed the television star?