Just when we thought it was safe to turn on the television again, we clicked the remote only to be confronted by the sight of what appeared to be a motionless ghoul surrounded by candlelight mumbling unintelligibly. It was the unintelligible mumbling that clued us in. We knew then that it could not have been a Halloween film, though we had initially thought that someone had gotten his/her holidays mixed up. If it were, the actors/actresses would have been speaking and shrieking; they would have been moving and there would have been sound. We let our fingers flick back to the previous screen and sure enough, it was Star Guyana, limping painfully to its grand finale at the National Cultural Centre.

We wanted to give 'Jack he Jacket', but could not bear to look at more than a few seconds of the Mighty Rebel haranguing some rebellious finalists. Clicked back a few minutes later and there was another masked and draped finalist (Or was it the same one?) talking about discrimination, or so we supposed.

We hoped to see some of the finalists actually demonstrating what they would have learned from the teams of experts, but after a few more clips of Henry Rodney and Vivienne Daniel berating those in their charge interspersed with phantom finalists doing their thing our fingers voluntarily found the off switch. It may have improved, but we can't say.

And if that were not bad enough, we gave ourselves yet another bitter pill to swallow by enduring the humourless, offensive nonsense poorly disguised as satire which aired on Christmas Day.

Unfortunately (Or should that be fortunately?) we only caught the closing song on 'Stretched Out Magazine'. Not an original by any stretch of the imagination, it was at least sung in tune and clearly the actors had rehearsed, which immediately put that lampooning session out of reach of the others.

'Not Necessarily the Prime News' was entirely unnecessary; it should not have been aired. We particularly abhorred the opening sequence, which showed the editor attempting to whip an employee as we believe that while it is alright to laugh at everything else, violence is the one thing that should not be parodied. And we found, gallingly, that that set the tone for all that followed.

The NCN offering, dry as overcooked Christmas chicken, while not distasteful was more than a few levels below dull. If we had to choose one memorable scene it would be the one which featured CEO Mohamed Sattaur's absurd Scottish get-up, complete with 'fuzzy' red wig, though what he actually said during that sequence remains a blur.

All in all, Christmas entertainment on local television stank this year, a direct result of the utter lack of standards in the local 'industry', if it can be called that. thestabroekscene@yahoo.com