Now Fade Ogunro is part of the generation of Nigerian On Air Presenters who tried to make the jump from being disembodied voices with multiple accents to being celebrities in their own right. Everybody has their own strategy for getting ‘Famous’; Nedu WazobiaFM has the misogynistic Nkechi, Toke moonlights as a high profile Bridesmaid and Fade’s gunning for Reality TV famous. To each his own I guess.
But I digress.
When Fade debuted her new series in February after announcing she was leaving her OAP gig to focus on her new production company, I really wanted to sink my teeth into it, after all it was the first business style Nigerian Reality TV show debuting exclusively on Youtube and was her vehicle for debuting her production company (in partnership with her famous brother music video director Sesan Ogunro). But I had shit to do so…
Now seems a good time as any to get around to it. Think of this as Popcorn and Pepper’s Rewatch Reviews.
Before we start, I’d like to state that I’m not even going to bother with the technical quality of the reality show, because the whole thing looks like a Snapchat story shot with the front camera of an Android. So lets ignore it and focus on the actual plot.
First off, Fade’s show is called Fade Ogunro: Assistant Search.
Why bother with a thought out show name, when you’re not going to spend money on anything else on the show. Like the opening montage, which is just a supercut of Fade in front of a grey wall in a dusty jumpsuit and doing her version of a power strut, which comprised of this…
And this…
And this…
The show starts with Fade walking into her ‘office’. She tells us she’s looking for an assistant (duh) and tells us she got three hundred applications and has whittled it down to thirty CVs because she’s so picky.
She then goes on to introduce her first ‘celebrity’ guest Jason Newsome, who according to Jason Newsome is a high profile manager and producer who has ‘partaken on both sides of the camera banging videos for Rihanna and reality tv for Donald Trump’.
They then spend the next couple minutes ‘scrutinizing’ CV’s. They basically just hold up pieces of pieces and make small talk. It would have been less painful to watch paint dry. But even in that boredom Fade manages to slip in, that her assistant has to have crazy bitch management skills because she is a crazy bitch.
Thankfully, Fade didn’t feel obligated to show us just how much of a bitch she can theoretically be and moved it along to her top 14 candidates. She tells them (and us) that she is very transparent and likes to do things and organized.
Fade: I am launching a new business, none of you know about this yet, but whoever I pick as my assistant will know about my business.
Now this scene with the candidates was so ridiculous I was almost in tears. Of the 14 final candidates, only 8 showed up. Even worse, the 8 candidates who did show up, one asked to leave.
Know why?
Fade didn’t inform any of them they were going to be on a reality show and tried to foist a Non-Disclosure Agreement on them, while they were already filming.
In any other country, the candidates would sue her ass into bankruptcy. Who the hell asks the cast of a reality show to sign N.D.A’s on set, AFTER the crew is already filming them? Then proceeds to put this on the internet?
If I was Fade, I would have hired the guy who refused to sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement, simply because he had enough common sense to not agree to a legal document he hasn’t had a lawyer look through, but a reality show this bad needs sheeple for it work so God speed.
Fade only needs five finalists at the end of episode one and she still has seven so she devises dastardly tasks for the hopefuls. She asks them to stand on a rug and turn it over with their feet (a game she admits she saw on Youtube the night before), ridicules CV’s and gives them a dictation test as an excuse to name drop ever single famous person/brand she has an shred of affiliation with.
But wait, there’s also a secret task: Fade’s put dustbins in a corner of the room and paper around the dustbin. Whoever picks a piece of paper and puts it in the dustbin without being prompted before the end of the day is instantly qualified.
That was so stupid she might as well have just gone to Balogun market randomly picked a LAWMA cleaner as a finalist.
So after all the frankly humiliating ‘tasks’, Fade’s guinea pigs are finally subjected to the eviction humiliation phase. In addition to Ronike, who gained automatic qualification for picking paper; Michael, Detola, Modupe, Labake get picked as her five finalists.
Phew! Thank God that’s done.
Some poor applicants were roped in to shoot testimonials, just as a final shot of humiliation.
At the end of this first episode, all I could think was, Fade WYD?
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