The fight to control the influx of Telenovelas flooding most Ghanaian screens seems to yield no results.
Media personality, Nana Aba Anamoah on Saturday, August 19, hosted four popular persons in the Ghanaian entertainment landscape on GHOne TV’s ‘Cheers‘ show to discuss reasons why sections of the public over the years have grown more interest in the English Premier League than the Ghanaian Premier League.
But in the course of discussion, the Pundits on the ‘Cheers’ show; Kafui Danku (Movie Producer), Sammy Bartels (Sports Journalist), Becca (Musician) and Kojo Rana (Musician) diverted abruptly to talk about reasons why telenovelas have taken centre stage of the Ghanaian movie industry.
Giving accounts of how past locally produced Television series and movies were fascinating to watch even though telenovelas were shown on most Television networks, the Pundits said the Ghanaian masses enjoyed the television series of old because they were top-notch and gave the telenovelas a strong competition in the movie industry.
Citing examples like local television series, Inspector Bediako, Things We Do for Love, Osafo Dadzie, Thursday Theatre, Ultimate Paradise, Taxi Driver as against the Foreign telenovelas or movies like Oshin, Acapulco Bay, Ezara, Journey to the West, the ‘Cheers’ guests disclosed that quality in the locally produced movies and series keeps dropping.
According to them, the foreign telenovelas have taken over the local movie market because they have improved on their works.
“Nature hates vacuum… Local people should have seen that there’s a market for these telenovelas. Let’s start churning out high quality production. You (Local producers)went to sleep and allowed the people to occupy the space and people developed a taste for the telenovelas,” Sammy Bartels said on Cheers.
Nana Aba Anamoah was of the view that the quality of local productions keep retrogressing becuase producers are not investing much into their industry.
“I blame the people in the industry, because they need to rise up and compete strongly with their foreign counterparts and not their own colleague in the same industry,” Nana Aba said.
https://youtu.be/RxR2hsMBbTA
