Morning Pop Fans, how was your weekend? I hope it rocked.
Speaking of rock and roll, here’s yesterday Sundays Times Column, which draws some comparisons between SA Idols and our upcoming elections, welcome to SA Poep Idol:
A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
SA POEP IDOL
I see there’s a new season of SA Idols starting a little later this year, I hear we’re in for quite a show, with some of the most entertaining contestants we’ve had since the concept first aired here in 1994.
Rumour has it there will be a contestant returning from last season, named Jacob Zuma, singing Shoot the Boer – acapella and a little off key. There will also be classic rocker, Helen Zille, returning for another season. And a youngster named Julius Malema, doing a solo in a beret. We can also expect to see Mamphela Ramphele, but nobody knows what she’ll be singing yet, even she isn’t so sure.
I joke, but maybe if our elections were a little more like SA Idol, more people would vote. In 2009, 12 million people who were eligible to vote didn’t make it to the polls. 5.4 million of whom were registered, but just didn’t bother to pitch on the day.
Since it first aired twelve years ago, South African Idols has had no problem drawing a crowd. The most recent season attracted just over nine million votes. That’s just a few mil short of the amount of people who were election no-shows in 2004.
Times have changed, if you want to hold people’s attention and get them voting, you need to offer entertainment. Not that our politicians aren’t entertaining, but perhaps there are learnings we can take from these hugely successful voter-driven reality TV shows so that we can be even more effective at pulling people in.
What if we got a panel of judges, and let them wean out the ridiculous or lunatic presidential candidates in an initial round, live on TV, and then once we’ve narrowed down the field to the most eligible, we could turn it over to the public to make their call.
For the judging panel I nominate Derek Watts from Carte Blanche. At least he’d be honest, plus he’s tall, you can’t go wrong with a tall guy. Professor Jonathan Jansen might be an idea too, he seems committed to South Africa and he has a great sense of humour which will come in handy in politics. Let’s also get in journalist, Mandy Weiner, she can squeeze the truth out of anything. And to round off the panel, how about we keep veteran idols judge, Randall Abrahams around? He’s always good for a laugh, and Julius Malema might even be able to get him to break poker face for the first time in TV history and crack a smile.
To give a little more depth, we could also add in an element of Miss SA to the elections, with a talent segment, a personality segment, and a debating segment – where the candidates have to answer some pretty tricky questions about what they would do if they were crowned. We could do a swimsuit parade too, but Ramphela would probably have that in the bag, and nobody should have to see Mangosuthu Buthelezi in a speedo.
Then the whole election could play out in a massive four-hour televised extravaganza, hosted by Colin Moss and Cyril Ramaphosa. We can also get the sign language guy in to sit in the bottom left hand corner of our screens and interpret for the hearing impaired voters, no wait, he was crap at that, I’ve got a better idea, let’s get him in as a potential candidate. When did being schizophrenic ever stop any of our other politicians?
All a bit over the top? Okay then how about we do the elections as the next series of Big Brother instead? We could shove all the candidates in a house together and film them twenty-four seven in the six weeks leading up to the vote. They might just naturally kill each other off and then whoever is left standing at the end could be our president by default. At least then it won’t be our fault if they don’t do such a great job once they’re in office.
Perhaps the message here is that if you don’t use your vote for something more important than Idols this year, someone else might use it for you, and then there’s no telling what we could end up with. Four years from now, the elections as a reality TV series, with all of Zuma’s wives as the show hosts and only eligible voters, might not be all that far fetched.
