Will someone please get all the breakfast radio presenters and producers in the country and shake some sense into them to inject a doze of reality. Breakfast radio is meant to be safe. Radio you can listen to with children, radio you can listen to with parents, radio you can listen to without having to look over your shoulder in case anyone else heard what you just heard. But breakfast radio in Kenya is crazy. In fact it is pornographic.
Take this example from last week. A lady wrote into a station asking for advice as a foreign man she had met on the internet had just sent her a plane ticket to go visit him. For the next half hour we were subjected to a discussion on penis size and which countries you should travel to for some good loving.
A few days later another show was discussing a couple who had not had sex for 6 months and what sex advice we could collectively give to get them at it like rabbits again. Now these are all valid topics for discussion I agree, just not why the nation is having its morning uji.
And it is not just a Kenyan thing, in South Africa I woke up to a radio discussion of whether M,M,F threesomes were better than M,F,F threesomes. And in Uganda listeners to the station which was being blasted in our Akamba bus were asked to call in with their GRANDPARENT’S sex secrets (because our grandparents had such healthy children you see). All this before 9am. What is going on here? Did one station go raunchy and the rest follow, or did they just all go mad at some FM radio convention and decide to shock the continent?
For more madness check out KenyaMusings’ on another crazy discussion yesterday and sylkwan’s post from the beginning of the year shows its been going on for a while.
I have to admit I am a big fan of Valentine Njoroge and Shawn Bartlett (??? I can never catch the co-hosts name) drive time show on Classic FM (Classic FM in Kenya unlike Classic FM’s anywhere else in the world has absolutely nothing to do with classic music. It plays classic old school tracks though, which is where I guess it gets its name.) Valentine and Yvonne (??? Still have no idea on that name) work well together on air and at least they talk about other stuff other than relationships relationships relationships.
Pamoja Tuangamize Ukimwi
Kaybees - Thanks for voting!
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September 26, 2006 at 3:54 pm
african
I remember the good old Phil Matthews days on Capital FM where even children used to call in and talk to him.
I dont listen to Kenyan morning radio due to the time diff but I do remember it had began going downhill by the time I left Kenya.
I think some of them are taking the sex sells mantra way to seriously and forgetting the roles and responsibilities of the mass media.
Does Classic FM stream? Soul stations here are hard to come by and are the preserve of baby boomers not like Kenya…
September 27, 2006 at 8:25 am
bankelele
As someone who listened (and misses) Howard Stern radio shows for a long time, I must say radio here is still pretty tame.
Morning drives are the biggest / most prestigious/ most lucrative time shows so stations keep trying to up one another. Stern (see teh movie “Private Parts”) received many compliants weekly and his reponse was always that parents should turn off the radio/or swithc the dial if the content was too risque - and yet surveys found that even the people who hated/complained/were most offended by his show listened to the show just as much as his true fans
September 28, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Ms K
I agree with the general notion of consumer choice i.e. if you don’t like something don’t listen to it. That’s all very well and good but what about common decency and morals? Surely, we don’t want top go the America/Howard Stern way. There is plenty of time at night to discuss viagra and droopy sex et al.
I must confess and say that I listen to those shows. They titilate, as they are supposed to, but I cannot bear to think of the day I will have little ones hanging on to every word said on those shows with their little prehensile ears.
At the end of the day, just because everyone is doing something doesn’t make it right. Funny how presenters of yore, Patricia Amira (?), Phil Matthews, TONY PATTI, Fareed were drop dead funny without resorting to this sort of talk. More recently, Leo Faya was HILARIOUS and yet he never had such risque topics (as far as I remember).
I think it is too simplistic to say “Change the channel”. And those who fire off this ingenuous retort must really stop to think and see what it is that those complainging are really REALLY talking about.
If I had the time, and didn’t need my beauty sleep, I’d stay up and listen to Nini at night because really, my human traits make me so susceptible to talk about sex and such things, and I would have no problem with her show because it comes at the right time.
I agree with you Mental, some sanity is surely needed on the breakfast shows.
October 9, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Shiroh
Breakfast radio in Kenya i think is currently meant for very horny young men and women. One day Valentine Njoroge that one you like was discussing about Sugar Mummys and justifying them and i was in a matatu. I could see the elderly were not amused