Board up your windows and lock your doors. The horror that is South African reality television intensifies this weekend when the foulest franchise to plague our nation is resurrected to walk the earth for yet another season.
Unleashing a scourge upon the land, the siren call of fame brings to life thousands of mindless hungry ghouls, desperately clawing their way out of graves of obscurity for a moment in the light. In their thousands they follow the scent of decay and descend upon stadiums and community centres, wandering aimlessly in queues.
After a long day of pushing and snapping, the moment arrives when individual contestants are herded into a well lit dungeon, lined with cameras. There they proceed to tear the heads off their favourite songs and suck the life from horrified viewers. A gruesome display, their feverish and off key lamentations make it clear that the only pitch these contestants have ever heard of was a type of fork the villagers back home chased them with.
A creatively starved production that has long ago been killed off by scandal, the grating display is perpetuated and manipulated by a trio of judges and sustained only by the power of their egos and the life force that they draw from a terrified camera man aiming the lens in their general direction. Limitless in their capacity to bore and annoy, and seemingly unstoppable, they return year after year, and when one self destructs in a vodka fuelled explosion of boney shrapnel, another hungry emissary of undeath immediately rises to take its place.
Who will receive a golden stamp of approval from the undead trio and what foul creatures will they unleash on us this year?
South African Idols Season 8 starts on M-Net on Sunday, 3 June 2012, at 17h30
