I saw Paul Daniels advertising a new Tesco insurance product on a row of TVs in or local department store the other day. The TV at our local spot keeps showing cheap ASDA ready meals and DVD box sets that will be ‘out on Monday’. For me this is pretty disconcerting. My ‘other life’ seems to be invading my Ghana life. Satellite TV has arrived in Koforidua. It’s been available for a while now, mainly for the plush hotels and wealthy Ghanaians, but a big push and a new Premiership coverage deal from DSTV, the local provider, means that dishes are popping up all over town. The new arrivals are mainly in bars, but one or two enterprising individuals have put them in back rooms and charge 50 pesewas to watch a match. They have chalk boards with lists of upcoming fixtures. Between football matches the spots show the Kiss Music Channel complete with British commercials.
Football is the main draw but there are also film channels, children’s channels and imported American dramas. There is nothing like the variety provided by Sky or Virgin but it provides a more choice than that provided by the terrestrial Ghanaian broadcasts. I do not have a TV, but the other two volunteer houses in town do. That said we have never sat down to watch a show together. GTV, Metro, TV3 and TV Africa show (to the inexperienced eye) similar combinations of football, news and current affairs, Ghanaian and Nigerian films, dubbed South American soaps and a limited selection of imported films and shows. I did once catch a half hour documentary on Zoomlion, the waste management contractor. Possibly the best thing, from our point of view, is the early morning direct feeds from BBC World News, CNN and Al Jazeera, only spoilt by the sudden indiscriminate chops from one channel to the next. The most bizarre thing I have seen is an English dubbed edition of a German heat for ‘It’s a Knockout’ which must have been almost 30 years old.
Without TV, the main alternative source of home entertainment is DVD. Available all over Ghana from stalls and street sellers, they sell for as little as three Ghana cedis. With incredible compression rates they manage to squeeze hours and hours of entertainment onto a single disc. This means complete series of shows like ‘Lost’ or ‘24’ or Prison Break’ (a particular favourite here) or a disc with, for example, all the Harry Potter films, and all the Spider-man films, and the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the 6 Star Wars episodes. Alternatively you can get most of the James Bond films (interestingly, this disc skips discerningly and selectively through the Moore films, ignores Dalton altogether but insists on including ‘Never Say Never Again’). The quality is not brilliant but they are watchable. It is the sound that suffers most. When it rains heavily on the metal roof you have to resort to headphones, if alone, or potentially one other person you know well enough to share with. There are usually English subtitles, which helps considerably. We viewed a near silent version of ‘Blood Diamond’, only able to pick up the odd nuance of Leonardo Dicaprio’s southern African accent.
Further entertainment is added by the imaginative titles given to the DVDs. Presumably the result of computer translation and typographic error, they include: Gun Irritable Battle Crime Roe, The Decisive Battle Orangutan Planet, Dolph Lundgren v. Robert De Niro and Beautiful Girl Special Service Unit.