TTT Carnival coverage embarrassing

THE EDITOR: Imagine the national television station is transmitting what we like to call the greatest show on earth and the mother of all carnivals to the wider world with the same old camera angles, poor audio and a complete lack of research on anything that would make people want to come to the country to experience the Carnival.

After 50-plus years of Carnival coverage, one would have thought those at TTT would have some new strategy to cover the Carnival more professionally and excitingly, with proper production planning to achieve the desired result.

For the Panorama semifinals (Sunday party), they could have shown old Panorama preliminaries video tapes as there was nothing new and carried a live audio feed with the images of an old Panorama semis.

Some roving reporters were asking each person they interviewed the same question. I have to admit there were one or two guest commentators who knew about pan, but the main topic of conversation was about the sponsored shirts the presenters were wearing.

The Kings and Queen's prelims were another disastrous attempt at covering a live show. Here again there was no research so information had to come via the stage announcers and was hard to hear. The director did not do a site visit before the show to notice his background for the stage was an empty North Stand. So here we had 30 or more costumes parading across a huge stage with an empty North Stand, and it would appear no one on the production team noticed. So much for crowd reaction.

A professional television team would have made sure of site visits to venues before the shows; checked camera angles and made changes were necessary; made sure audio feeds were audible; filmed in advance short features on behind-the-scenes and other elements of interest in the event there was a lull; and, most importantly, ensured announcers had proper research rather than just showing up "to do a show."

After many, many years of covering Carnival events, we just can't get it right.

It's as if this is the first time TTT is covering Carnival.

C PETERS

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