For drama, it’s really hard to top live TV, writes Paul Eksteen.
|||Gone Surfing
Poor Ben Stokes.
Unless your name is Marlon Samuels, your heart has to go out to a player who fluffed the biggest moment of his international career and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory as millions looked on.
How Stokes must have wished the earth would open up and swallow him as six after soul-destroying six sailed through the Calcutta night sky. His porcelain white cheeks flushed crimson in horror, or maybe that was just the reflection of the fireworks that put an exclamation mark on each new humiliation.
We all have our off days. Our embarrasing moments. It’s just that no one then sets off booming fireworks to compound our misery like they did with ol’ Ben. No one flies your closest friends and family half-way around the world just to watch you melt like an up-to-date potato in the cauldron of a T20 final. And then, to top it all off, your most outspoken rival props his feet up on the desk at a press conference and tells the world that you had it coming.
For drama, it’s really hard to top live TV.
It’s true: most of the time nothing really happens, but that’s also precisely what makes the most memorable moments even more so.
Many viewers would have probably stifled a yawn at the thought of an etv Africa 360 debate, but then host Chris Maroleng told the AWB guy “don’t touch me on my studio”, and a legend was born.
Most people ordinarily wouldn’t be bothered with the political fawning in parliament, but then last year the EFF got bumrushed out of the house and now SONA is must-see TV. And who can forget OJ Simpson going nowhere slowly in a white Ford Bronco with the cops on his tail?
Live TV was reality TV before Housewives were Real, before there were Kardashians to Keep Up With, before Straight Guys ever needed a Queer Eye. It was reality without the quotation marks because it is a lot like life: mostly mundane with sprinklings of the spectacular. That anticipation that something would happen kept us on tenterhooks.
Unfortunately for England, the moments that had us hooked also saw them hung out to dry.