It’s Sunday. I go to a friend’s house, switch on the TV and it’s already on the so-called “Station of the nation”. Then I see ‘GTV presents’… I hate to watch GTV but this time around, I decided to wait and see what’s about to unfold. The next slide I see says “Cantata”.
The graphics were so awful and I ask myself why this programme is still on national TV. The last time I watched ‘Cantata’ was in 1999 and it was ghastly. So for a moment, I considered flipping channels but curiosity got the better of me and I decided to watch and see if anything had changed.
At the end of the first scene, I wondered whether I should laugh or cry. The two men who had been speaking about forgiveness suddenly break into song – a mid tempo number – and the singing is not the quality that would shame someone like King Ayisoba.
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After singing awfully for about three minutes they start jumping around – out of the blue – all in the name of dancing.
I wanted to laugh because I wondered how this sort of foolishness could be called acting – even for comic relief. And then my heart sunk because I realized how TV drama had retrogressed in this country. Gone were the days when as a child I would make sure that I’d finished all my chores in good time every Sunday evening so that I could make time to watch ‘Osofo Dadzie’ with no interference from my mum.
‘Cantata’ makes ‘Osofo Dadzie’ seem like a production that should have won a number of Golden Globes every week.
I don’t know how a crappy TV gets worse. But it seems an easy enough feat at GTV. That’s what they have done with ‘Cantata’.
That programme is a criminal waste of airtime.
The acting is puerile. If you placed your dog in front of your TV whiles is ‘Cantata’, don’t be surprised if it turns around to bite you. That sort of acting in ‘Cantata’ would make the likes of Fred Addae and Kwadwo Kwakye puke in their coffins.
And what’s with all the silly singing? I know a ‘cantata’ is musical composition or performance but what GTV churns out weekly on its ‘Cantata’ programme is not what the original idea is about.
GTV ‘Cantata’ is a disgraceful perversion of what a ‘cantata’ ought to be. People singing shamelessly off-key and jumping aimlessly about on a set bedecked in tonnes of plastic flowers is not what a cantata is about.
I just can’t believe I wasted 45 minutes of my life watching ‘Cantata’ and after all the pointless singing and crazy jumping, I couldn’t make head or tail of what the episode, titled ‘Moses and Herod Part 21’, was about.
In the episode, I saw Nana Bosomprah who passed away a couple of weeks ago, as one of the main actors. He also wrote the script. In fact, he used to write almost all the ‘Cantata’ script and he was the driving force behind it. It’s pretty sad that he’s dead and gone. I will try and spare 45 more minutes of my life to pray for his soul to rest in peace. In that period, I would also pray for the managers at GTV to be blessed with wisdom so that they would be kind enough to allow ‘Cantata’ to also take a rest – in Nana Bosompra’s eternal bosom!
