6 keys from the edge…

Coming soon… Like on Sunday actually

A place where strangers come together, perform chores and get drunk and get up to all sorts of mischief… kinda like boarding school, with a catch; consenting adults and a minister with way too much time on his hands. The excitement builds as we wait and see whether the gay and lesbian community shall have fair representation again, whether there will be a housemate with an aversion to hair and more importantly whether any guy shall try to foster ‘relations’ with the south in this, the fourth instalment of BIG BROTHER AFRICA.

From the get go, we know they mean business what with the whole “revolution” tag that has been bundled with it.  There’s also a new logo and a new host so this ought to be a big deal. Someone in the Multichoice marketing office is clearly trying to reach the “that abstract eye kinda bugs me” demographic.

They say this particular edition will be different prompting a viewer in a certain pepper’s newsroom to scream, “Please don’t cut out the sex!” whilst elsewhere one wonders, “more clocks than BBA 3?”

Strategy is always key in this show. Bertha and Sheila strode into the house with the whole I don’t give a **** attitude, which while really adorable at first, ended up making them look like the villains of the story. Slutoya figured that sex sold, but in a bizarre twist, the African voting public felt differently. Dare I suggest that porn has lost the lustre from way back when? I mean, when the Angolan Squirrel tried to get down and dirty with that Tanzanian dude we let her be. Yes, even when she tried to probe him with a dodgy looking balloon.

Of course the beast that is Big Brother is not easily swayed. Ask Angola’s Bruna, who despite looking hotter than a bleached lady of the night, was voted out unceremoniously.  See what I did back there? I made reference to Beauty and the Beast. I even pulled a Morris in the process and used a word with six syllables.

That in itself is also going to be an issue. Who the heck is our representative? Is it a guy? Is it a lady? The dismal performances after Gaetano suggest that we are flunking out on both fronts, perhaps this time round we should have a Crested Crane saunter in there. What? It’s a revolutionary idea that just might fly. In any case, going by the previous shows it would be pretty interesting to see which guy tries to hit that. Will there be another Ricco on the prowl, packing the kiss of death.

Speaking of death. How do these housemates get selected? I mean, sure we have Warona types that from the word go are breathing fire and giving the devil a run for his money till they dumpen our spirits (and beds?) by forming coalitions that don’t work, but I digress. What I was saying was, why do we get the feeling that the selection process is akin to giving a 5 year old a box of crayons and asking him to let himself go.

We end up having a bunch of odd balls that’s for sure. But on a positive note we also end up having dude’s like Bayo who give us hope that not all the stuff that comes out of Nigeria is bad. They may have weird movies, but they have characters with heart…and untapped libidos if Ofunneka’s involvement in the fingergate scandal is proof of anything.

Oh, but there are the intense moments of passion… passionate affairs with the bottle, with slumber and in some very rare instances, with candle holders…no, not that way, I meant the whole Takondwa fiasco…remember him? The dude with one sweater? No, not Maureen, Takondwa! Maureen is married and I for one can’t tell you how happy I am that she got a happily ever after after all she endured. I can’t tell you and probably won’t. I can’t do her enough justice. (Justice was Botswana’s representative at some point, but he sort of fell short of people’s expectations and doesn’t merit his own paragraph)

Then we’ve got tasks aplenty. I get that Biggie has tonnes of stuff to do, I mean, he isn’t God, you can’t expect him to see everything that’s going on in a small house some place in South Africa, but would it be too much to ask that he give the housemates some sensible tasks. It hasn’t been reported anywhere in the papers, but there’s probably a housemate from the last show that had to see a shrink to deal with playing make believe hosting a visitor from outer space…and there is probably at least one that walked out and remarked, “you mean Krypto wasn’t really from another planet? You mean that form of greeting was a ruse?”

Not to belabour the point, but does strategy have any role in this game? I like how just about everyone says they have some sort of strategy and then when things go the wrong way, they walk out of the house with the whole, “I was just being myself.” A claim which makes us freaked out that Mimi is in fact a gossip in real life, that Max is…well, what can be said about Max. I sort of feel in Uti we got what Kwaku was going for but failed to pull off. The whole suave but not really trying to be a star thing that endeared him to countless fans. I liked Meryl. She was cool. She had cornrows and I suspect if I’d bothered to look in the dictionary under the word carefree, I’d find her looking up at me, beer in hand and poised to remove her top, just because.

Okay, enough with the brief trip down memory lane, here’s what you need to know; Kabelo has been replaced with a Nigerian star of some sort, the prize money has been doubled, we have more housemates from more countries with less capacity for pronouncing words properly and, according to an article online, there shall be no nudity permitted. They did say ‘revolution’, not ‘revelation’.

And in case you need a fix; words alone; you can count daily recaps in the main paper and facebook messages from an extremely eager Patrick (second name withheld). I don’t know whether UBC will jump on board this time round, so I suppose it’s safe to say that DSTVs channel 198 is where the action, the mystery and intrigue will be. Warning, there may also be some characters that cure insomnia, so you know you wanna stay up for that!