Lagos Was The Hub Of Terrestrial Television Broadcasting

Ours was a time when institutions helped parenting obligations. For instance, all the Television stations in the early 90s transmitted from 4pm to 10pm on week days, except of course, on special occasions like public holidays or weekends, when they would commence transmission by 10am and still end by 10pm.
It was an era where TV programming was largely censored and contents were designed to be family friendly. As a day student, it was part of my smart routines to be abreast of virtually all programmes on Television, many of which had a lot to offer in life lessons. From the British soapoperas like “The Rich also cries” to “Issora the slave girl”, we moved to much local flavours like “Checkmate”, “Beyond the clouds”, “Fortunes”, “The New Masquerade” etc.

Then came the liberalisation of television broadcasting in the mid to late 90s. The Capitalists swept in, in Lagos we had AIT, DBN, and Superscreen leading the pack. Minaj came through from the East. Somehow, regulation was still topnotch, until AIT began the 24hrs transmission thingy. It was a novelty that many Parents of that era could hardly keep up with. Suddenly, midnight movies set in, and we started viewing contents that were nothing close to what we had earlier…

For whatever it’s worth, I still concede to the Private televisions for trailing behind a dying NTA with family friendly TV contents, at least until much later. How, we moved from all those to outright obscenity can only be explained by Kenny Ogungbe (KK) and Dayo Adeneye (D1) who through their efforts at opening the Nigerian music industry using the American template dipped us into a moral crisis that, somehow, normalised good sounds with almost zero lyrics (this is my opinion).

TBC…

— Mazi Ejimofor Opara writes from Awka, Anambra State.