In de gayelle

The thing I like best about Gayelle the Channel is its slogan: “At last we own TV!” What I like about it is that nobody who doesn’t understand both Standard English and Standard Trinidadianese would get the pun. When the station first began broadcasting, I surfed in and surfed out without much pause. I am not one of those people who believe that something should be supported just because it’s local. My dips didn’t reveal much to either interest, entertain or benefit me. I had planned to wait until Gayelle had original programming and then try them again. But it was my hairdresser Pabs, owner of Parbatie’s All Hair Salon and one of the few hairdressers who knows how to cut naturally curly hair, who made me take a longer look.

“They have this show between six-thirty and seven, Philomena and Kailash,” she said. “I doh miss that.” So the next evening, I tuned in at six-thirty to Philo Mania and listened as “Philomena” talked all her business with Kailash. It was a most hilarious and entertaining half-hour and, after I watched the show a few more times, I was also impressed on several other counts. The formula is a standard one: the comic playing to the straight man, but the originality lies in “Philomena” being the Gayelle studio’s cleaning lady. The character is played by actress and radio announcer Deborah Maillard, while Kailash Bedi just plays herself. It is a simple and novel concept. Moreover, there is no script, just a premise: in other words, a reliance on the Trini penchant for ole-talk.

Philomena is working-class, and her conversation ranges across man problems, money problems, child issues, and everything that normal people talk about. She even makes comments about other Gayelle employees, just as a real cleaning-lady would. Kailash, Indian-born and upper middle-class, is the perfect foil. Maillard plays Philomena superbly, with the just the right touch of parody not to lose the character but still get the maximum humour out of the premise. In this programme, Gayelle fulfils its basic mandate: to show us ourselves. After Philo Mania, there is the Gayelle News. I had only found out a few weeks earlier that Carla Foderingham was the presenter, and that alone tells me that, if Gayelle’s owners could expand their mandate, they would soon have the most-watched news programme in the country. Carla is by far superior to Shelley Dass on NBN’s Panorama and Colleen Holder on the TV6 News. Apart from being more attractive — like it or not, TV is a visual medium — Carla exudes a warmth and honesty that Holder and Dass are singularly deficient in. Even Carla’s stand-in, reporter Charlene Ramdhanie, has an urchin cuteness that fits right in with the Gayelle ethos.

But this is only one reason why Gayelle News could become the top-rated programme in the country. Hardly anyone watches the soon-to-defunct TTT now, and this is not because their news programme is terrible — because it is not, either technically or in its content — but simply because the viewing public does not trust the news on the State-owned media (which alone tells how successful Lenny Saith’s plan is going to be). And, although the effects have not manifested yet, I suspect TV6’s credibility has also been damaged because of the exodus of nearly all its top persons since Natalie Williams took over as Head of News. Unfortunately, news is not Gayelle’s focus. They have only three full-time reporters, and so their half-hour newscast remains limited. Making it a proper programme would require funding which I am pretty sure they don’t have.

Even so, advertisers are already showing interest in the station. Gayelle got started with “gold sponsorship” (meaning the advertisers didn’t really expect to get their money’s worth back) from FCB, Courts, Atlantic LNG and NGC. They also have other advertisers for their programmes, such as VO5 shampoo (whose ad I noticed simply because of its technical excellence and its use of a full range of extraordinarily attractive, very Trini models). But one pardner who works for an advertising firm tells me that clients are actually calling his agency to try and get their commercials on the station.

As far as getting their money’s worth goes, advertisers would probably focus on Philo Mania and the station’s early morning programme, Cock-a-doodle-doo, which is hosted by Wendell Etienne, Magella Moreau and, usually but not always, Errol Fabien. This programme puts to shame the competition on TTT and TV6. The former has Paolo Kernahan, who has a nice wit and an easy presence, but Paolo is easily surpassed by the cross-talk and picong that Cock-a-doodle-doo’s two (or three) hosts indulge in. Callers to the programme frequently tell the hosts that they make them late for work. “I trying to get out the door, but every time I reach I have to run back to hear the next joke,” one short-breath woman said.

But it isn’t that the programme is only kicks. Earlier this week, they had lawyer Gregory Delzin on to talk about the death penalty. Apart from presenting clear and irrefutable arguments against capital punishment, there were a few callers who actually agreed with Delzin: and this is something I have never heard on any talkshow dealing with this virulent topic. Gayelle the Channel, then, is distinct from the other TV stations in two particular ways. The first is the obvious one: its programming is entirely local. The second is that it runs on talent, whereas the other stations run on professionalism. I do not by this mean that talent is not professional: in fact, talent cannot create anything superior unless it is very professional (a truism wanna-be writers, to cite my own area of expertise, often fail to realise).

But most of the on-camera people at Gayelle do things that the well-trained on-camera people at the other stations cannot do: but the reverse, one should note, is not true. The trouble with relying on talent is that, if talent doesn’t continue to appear, your dogs dead. But the existence of Gayelle the Channel means that some people who would have gone into a profession and spent the rest of their lives making money and being perpetually dissatisfied - some of those persons may now take up another mantle. And the day Trinis learn to make money from talent, is the day that we will be a truly developed nation.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh