BY IKENNA OBIOHA
If everything should go as planned, the television industry will be witnessing a landmark in the coming months. A new award show aptly called the Tube Awards is expected to launch later this year. The announcement was made by the Nollywood filmmaker Fidelis Duker who is one of the organisers of the awards.
“We found out that the only industry that has not been properly positioned in terms of rewarding excellence on the continent is television. Most national and continental awards have just one category for television. We felt there was a need to create an authentic continental award for television,” he said in an interview.
According to Duker, the Tube Awards is fashioned to honour, promote and strengthen ties within the creative television industry on the African continent. It hopes to achieve this by employing the technical expertise of industry experts with continental and global exposure in the business of television and television broadcast to assess works from across the Africa continent in 15 categories. Suffice to say, the Tube Awards will be our Emmy Awards.
Duker also stated that the awards has been in the pipeline for over two years now. He further said that within that preparatory timeframe, the team have structured a five-year plan for the award’s run, remarking that it wasn’t a project bound to fail in its early years considering that they are focused on a particular section being television.
“The issue of fatigue is relative because every day I hear television producers complaining that most of the awards we currently have target the film and music industry forgetting that there is a huge continental television industry that also needs a reward system. Also note with interest that in Nigeria, the media awards only reward a section of the television industry,” explained Duker.
The organisers who also include the author of Ladies Calling the Shots, Adeniran Adedokun revealed that they were inspired by old cathode ray tube (CRT) television that characterised the television culture of the 1950s to the late 90s, hence its name.
“The name was carefully chosen to reflect our understanding of television. If you remember television has always been known as the tube until recently when we now have television on the go, that is, phones and other modern television devices like the LED and LCD screens. What is however important is that the tube covers the entire television landscape.”
