For interviews that go on and on and on…

Have you ever watched an interview of your favourite celebrity and wished it wouldn’t end? Well my friend, I’ve got just the remedy for your pain. Take a healthy spoonful of E-Diary, K24’s entertainment programme once every week and you should be fine. In fact you will probably slip into a deep slumber and wake up feeling revitalized.  What I am on about, in case it’s not yet clear, is how guests on this show seem to be interrogated for days, leaving us wondering what hidden information the presenter is seeking to extract from them.  Maybe it’s a new torture technique, I don’t know.

Now, Remy, I have no beef with you, don’t get me wrong. I think you are intelligent and charming. But jeez, I don’t give a wit what Kenzo is going to have for supper or how conveniently close his barber is from his house. To be fair, maybe that knowledge will help some fainting fan get a photo-op but I’m sure most will agree that that is overkill. I stumbled upon that particular interview while channel surfing some time back (I don’t know about you, but I stopped reading the TV guide from the newspapers a few years ago). Believe it or not, my nails had grown a centimeter by the time they were running the credits. The interview started in a poorly lit cave (or at least that’s what it looked like) with the musician fielding questions about his craft. At that point I think his career consisted solely of the song in which he renounces his bachelorhood to his potential mother-in-law and asks her not to get in the way. With this in mind, I expected the exchange to consume less than three minutes. But lo and behold, the dialogue wouldn’t end. My impatience drove me to reach for the remote, and I flipped through the stations, found nothing interesting, went and made a cup of tea, washed clothes, brought the cows back in, climbed Mt. Kenya… When I came back to my sofa and turned K24 back on, I found that they had only been warming up. They were now showing us how they followed the budding musician home to give us a peek into his typical day. Again, if this was Susan Owiyo- somebody who has travelled the world and produced several albums- maybe the length of the interview would’ve been justified. But for a novice in the music industry?

   A few days ago they brought DNG in for questioning and I was happy to note a couple of improvements. First, the set was less hostile- rather than the previous dungeon with a single light-bulb, the subject was put in a well lit area. Next and more crucially, we were not taken out of the studio. Sadly, however, the interview still took ages- my brother downloaded an entire season of Top Gear in the process. Another problem came to my attention during this episode. It appeared to me that Remy, the hostess, was trying to counsel DNG. She kept telling him what he had experienced and how it had affected his life- “…I know you were going through a period of change in your life…” instead of letting him tell it to us. Talkative as DNG is (he’s a professional MC), I think I can count the words he managed to squeeze in on my fingers.

I could also talk about how plain and static the graphics of E-Diary are and how the cameramen always seem to find the most dubious and uninteresting angles to shoot from but I’m afraid this rant has gone on for far too long.