ROMANCE, ADVENTURE ... AND THE ’80s
The 1980s has usurped the crown as the deadliest decade, considering the 1350s and 1940s, writes
Are you unlucky in romance?
Have you been looking for love in all the wrong places? I guess it didn't occur to you to try looking on the side of a mountain — which is the premise of SABC3’s upcoming show.
Perhaps you saw the promo video on YouTube in July last year,
The Longest Date Contestan
Search [sic], the results of which are the new reality dating adventure show, The Longest
Date. It’s hosted by Christopher Jaftha, who you may have seen around on local TV quite a lot and has an impressive resumé of shows under his belt. He takes the 16 contestants, who all seem to have a sob story about their romantic histories, out into the wild, pairs them up and then has them engage in all kinds of outdoor-sy challenges such as rafting and abseiling.
Even after watching the trailer and reading the synopses, I’m still not entirely sure how the two components, adventure and romance, tie into each other, but I guess we’ll have to watch the show, starting on February 11 at
7.30pm on channel 193, to find out.
New reality show
And it seems SABC3 is coming out swinging with another new reality show, not a local one though, and this one is about entrepreneurship.
You know how it goes: in each episode a group of starry-eyed gogetters present their products to a panel of successful business people and have to prove they have a good enough plan to warrant an angel investment. Only the two most likely to succeed will be considered. All four of the mentors have to agree before any contestant receives funds. The mentors are tech mogul Randi Zuckerberg, entrepreneur Ido Leffler, marketer Lauren Maillian and online educator Sarah Prevette.
The synopses didn’t give away too many of the startups they will feature, but a few were mentioned. There’s Looksie, a Nova Scotia-based business that provides 3D virtual tours of properties to potential buyers, and Oh! Juice, an organic juice and health food restaurant in San Diego.
But perhaps the weirdest one was Podshare, a sort of network of shared living spaces in houses in neighbourhoods around the US, with aims to go global. At first it sounded like a convenience thing for business travel — but on the website it seems like they’re pushing it as a social thing, to live in different places. I even saw the word cult
Crime wave
being tossed around. Catch
Quit Your Day Job, to see whether Podshare and other fledgling ventures get a packet of cash from February 18 at 8.30pm. This last one I picked was almost solely because of the title screen. Why do so many shows and videogames focusing on the ’80s have title screens featuring pink and purple neon scrawl? Surely there was more to this inexplicably beloved decade than that, perhaps one of the worst crime waves in US history, as this new crime doccie series asserts. It’s called The 1980s: The Deadliest
Decade. I wonder what their metric was for qualifying that title? Sure it features a bunch of murders and even some massacres, but I can think of far deadlier decades, such as the 1340s and 1350s for the Black Plague, or the 1910s and 1940s for World War 1 and World War 2 respectively. But that’s the ’80s for you, tacky and overblown — just like people's nostalgia for the span of years that gave us HIV/Aids, the Satanic Panic, the Cold War and shoulder pads.
And these murders were pretty bad too, so if you fancy learning about cases such as the Heartland Massacre, in which a Minnesota farmer murdered his family and his neighbour’s and tried to pin it on the neighbours’ 14-year-old son, or the Black Monday Murder, in which a Wall Street executive strangled his wife to death, catch the show Friday at 9pm on Real Time (channel 155).