Craze for telenovelas grips Ivory Coast

Int’l TV soaps aimed at women take African screens by storm

ABIDJAN, Aug 26, (Agencies): With names like “Caribbean Flower” and “Love in Manhattan”, international TV soaps aimed at women have been taking African screens by storm.

In Ivory Coast, Latin American telenovelas — melodramatic sagas focused on complicated romantic intrigues — have been gradually eating into TV schedules, dubbed into French along with similar offerings from India and across Africa. And the viewers can’t get enough of them. “When I watch a series, all my worries disappear,” says Abe Mireille, a hairdresser in the economic capital Abidjan.

Traore Adama, a taxi driver in the southern city’s working-class Koumassi neighbourhood, goes so far as to joke that the craze could even pose a safety hazard.

“When the show starts, you’d better pray to God that nothing’s on the stove — because if there is, it’s going to burn,” he chuckles.

Thick with plots about love affairs and betrayals, such shows tend to be scheduled during the daytime before husbands return home from work.

TV channels are aiming to hook not just housewives, but women who often have televisions in their workplaces — cleaners, hairdressers, seamstresses.

Ouya Monnier, head of programming at national television station RTI, said the broadcaster reserves three key slots for telenovelastyle soaps.

“At 8:00 am it’s Indian telenovelas,” Monnier said. “And at 1:00 pm and at 6:00 pm, it’s Brazilian soaps.”

Massive

In an indication of the genre’s massive African following, specialist channel Novelas TV is now the leading channel serving the continent in French, with more than 10 percent of market share, according to an Africascope audience survey.

And US Spanish-language giant Telemundo launched an African channel in 2013, showing Latino telenovelas around the clock.

For Yao Yao, a professor at Abidjan’s Felix Houphouet-Boigny university, soap-mania is to be expected in Ivory Coast, where cultural activities such as concerts are often expensive.

“People are more likely to watch television in developing countries — it’s a means of entertainment and escape,” he adds.

The easy-to-follow plots also make them accessible for people with busy lives.

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LOS ANGELES: Thanks to six hours a day of telenovelas, stripped Mondays to Fridays, Chilean broadcaster Mega TV has dominated the country’s television landscape over the past three years. But one particular telenovela has gripped this country of some 17 million inhabitants, driving Mega TV’s ratings to historical levels.

“Perdona Nuestros Pecados” (“Forgive Us Our Sins”) has generated average ratings of 27.4 in its 10 pm time slot, nearly triple that of competing programs on its next biggest rival, Canal 13. Credit also goes to a newish executive team, led by CEO Patricio Hernandez, who joined the company in 2013; head of content Patricia Bazan; production and operations chief Andrea Dell’Orto; and Juan Ignacio Vicente, head of content and international Business. Before the new team took over, Mega TV’s average rating was 4.3 in 2013, compared to its current average of 11.2, said Vicente.