The Hostel: pioneers new television era

Local television is undergoing a revolution, if the efforts of stations in Uganda are to go by. The newest show designed to pique the interest of the audience enough to force them to yearn for more is The Hostel on NTV.

The show joins the lengthening line of those increasingly being designed for the local viewer to counter the exposure from programmes from other markets. Television execs in East Africa have been running around for a couple of years now searching for that elusive quality that will make the viewers stay glued to their stations.

Is it western series with a cool rock sound track, a hard menu of news from the streets or an increasingly citizen-managed platform? Whatever it is, managers have not been sitting around waiting for the answer to come to them in a revelation.

Produced by Fast Track Productions Limited, a multi-media outfit operating out of Mutungo on the outskirts of Kampala, The Hostel has been presented as a revolution in African, not just East African, television.

The Hostel claims the spot as the first daily show with a two-season plan and a conclusion already worked out even before it launches. The show, termed a dramedy, comes to Ugandan TV laden with a heavy responsibility – it must succeed if this kind of TV is to flourish soon.

The series follows the experiences of a group of young students at an unnamed university. The viewer is brought into the lives of these hot-blooded students hungry for life and ready to grab their opportunities at whatever cost.

Though these are the stories of university-age students, the viewer will quickly realise the characters are universal and their pains, joys, fears and aspirations are the same whatever the circumstances of the person. Fear of poverty is not a reserve of campusers, after all.

A fiercely Ugandan feel permeates the acting with every opportunity to emphasise the local flavour taken. It is in the adlibbing in different Ugandan languages, the back stories of the major characters that speak into the lives of most of those watching and the promise of even deeper self-revelation that may put The Hostel on the radars of many viewers.

The fact that the show will be on TV from Wednesday to Saturday should not be ignored. Whatever the views of the watching public, one must recognise the work The Hostel has cut out for itself. No other show in the recent history of Ugandan TV has tried to play the whole week.

“As we introduced the concept to the first people, there was always the incredulity behind the question, ‘How are you going to pull it off?’” Solea Munyana creative director of Fast Track recalls. Proposing a daily show seemed an order tall enough without adding that The Hostel is a 90-episode-per-season show capable of running even more than the four days allocated it.

It is perhaps understandable, this scepticism. Other shows in the past have failed the staying power test the world over because of one reason or another, usually financial or because of a derailed script.
But the producers of the show say they did their research before they decided to climb Mount Improbable. The script was written by the tried and tested Kwezi Kaganda and as much professionalism as the company could manage was not spared.

The set is a multi roomed house in Mutungo with just enough space for the purposes of the creators. The hostel is a co-ed affair and the different rooms in the house help portray what a hostel in today’s Uganda probably feels like, complete with a nosy care-taker who thinks too much of his importance. Kaganda also helms the ship and this should probably be an advantage given his experience on other TV productions.

The menu of subjects that the show tackles includes city life, roommates, friendships, prostitution, romance, hatred, academics and quite about anything one would expect to go through in a Ugandan hostel.

“The Hostel is a uniquely Ugandan phenomenon,” a Fast Track executive points out. “In our days, when we went to university, there was no such thing as hostels. We slept in university halls. Even in other East African countries, hostels are still a novelty.”

The actors chosen to front these characters (Hellen Lukoma, Richard Tuwangye, Daniel Omara, Mathew Nabwiso etc) probably appreciate the responsibility they have been given. The concept of a daily show, that the audience will come back every day for, will need to be aired almost perfectly for the concept to be picked up by other producers and TV stations in the industry but also by advertisers.
And Fast Track believes television is the media of the future. Pioneers always have the task of spreading the gospel and this time, advertisers will be pursued relentlessly.

“We already have some big supporters who have made it possible to bring the show to this level,” Martin Kintu who manages operations at the company lets on. “We have Mountain Dew and MTN. As time goes on, we shall need to get more.” Already, NTV has 20 episodes to start.

The result of the lobbying done by the show’s producers will probably be to persuade financial backers of this and other TV shows to insist that their monies go towards local production. Funding a project like The Hostel is not cheap, as was revealed about the budget of the show (approximately Shs900m per season).

Should The Hostel appeal to the local audience and replace the Nigerian and Venezuelan soaps, the door to truly local production would have been kicked wide open.

The model has worked elsewhere and probably gave the company the conviction that their fortunes would be made by only local programming. Citizen TV in neighbouring Kenya started out in 2005 as the obscure number four station, not known by many. Then the station started showing the biggest number of local productions while the likes of NTV and KTN, the national broadcaster, were showing the cheaper western soaps.

As of 2008, Citizen was the number one station. It is hoped that productions like The Hostel will help maintain ratings for stations like NTV that air them.

The revolution in TV will be assessed after the public has had its say on the matter. Ugandans will decide, after getting used to the concept of a four-day show on TV, if they think the concept can fly or not. The strength of the show is probably in its local flavour.