Locked down. Locked in. Confined to barracks. Whichever way you phrase it, it comes to pretty much the same thing. But to be honest when you’ve been working from home for 20 years LD-Day looks pretty much like any other Friday.
Except that I don’t usually have men with guns strolling up and down the road outside my home. Well actually I do, it’s just that they normally come around in the wee hours of the morning and they’re not big on social distancing. But in fairness they have been wearing masks long before it became a fashionable necessity.
But that’s another story!
Speaking of masks I couldn’t help wondering whether eNCA news reporters were setting the right tone by strolling around crowded shopping malls and infringing the two-metre social distancing rule by repeatedly sticking an open microphone into the faces of a sequence of similarly unmasked consumers to ask how safe they were feeling about coronavirus. I mean what do you say? “Actually I was feeling pretty safe until you stuck that thing in my face. Thank you for asking”.
Mind you I’ll say one thing about the coronavirus; unlike Helen Zille and Eusebius McKaiser, it doesn’t discriminate.
Mind you I’ll say one thing about the coronavirus; unlike Helen Zille and Eusebius McKaiser, it doesn’t discriminate. Prince Charles and now Boris Johnson both sent off to the naughty corner in the space of a week. I would imagine there’s quite a tussle on to see who had it first: Prince Charles or Anthony Joshua.
I hope it’s Prince Charles because if it is Anthony Joshua then it’s off to the Tower of London for him and we’ll never see him fight The Gypsy King. It’s all like something out of a Dean Koontz, or if you’re a local, a Deon Meyer novel, and you think it would serve as a vivid reminder that nobody is safe from infection. Ask Tom Hanks and Idris Elba. Just ask the families of South Africa’s first two coronavirus victims. An unspeakable tragedy and my heart goes out to those who have suffered loss and those who are yet to.
So knowing all this, how is it possible that anybody could wake up on LD-Day and conclude that owning an expensive mountain bike would make you Covid-19 immune? What is it about Mamils that leads them to conclude that they should have some special immunity? I mean at the best of times there’s a strong case for suggesting Mamils should be permanently locked down and not allowed to roam the plains of suburbia with impunity.
…it’s interesting to note that in the USA the effect of Covid-19 isolation has been to push up TV ratings
We’re all developing our home entertainment strategy for the next few weeks. More of that in later blogs but it’s interesting to note that in the USA the effect of Covid-19 isolation has been to push up TV ratings. @Nielsen reports that in recent weeks TV ratings have increased by 20% in New York and Chicago and 22% in Austin and Denver.
Seems like a good time to be in the TV audience business but with the spiralling global cutback in #advertising #media investment it’s sure not a good time to be selling those same audiences.
When it comes to real entertainment though, I’d certainly be interested in watching a race between the average Joburg Metro Cop patrolling the streets on LD-Day and some of the Mamils lumbering around Jozi.
That would certainly be worth buying the winner a bucket of KFC and a Coke.
Gordon Muller is Africa’s oldest surviving media strategist. Author of Media Planning – Art or Science. Mostly harmless! Read his Khulumaedia Blog here.
