Parade Coverage

This post will not make any sense to my non Philly readers, so you guys can idnore it. For those of you from Philly, only the ones that are Mummers fans need continue.

See I'm a lifelong Philly resident. I grew up with the amazinf tradition of the Mummers parade on New Years Day. For years, I lived 50 yards from the main parade route and I went in and out of the house all day to watch on the street. It was wonderful. Then the parade moved to Market Street. Then I moved away for a while.

Now the parade is back on Bread Street and though I'm back living in Philly I am down the shore in AC every new years so I try to watch the parade on tv. And that is where all the problems start for me.

I've got two main problems with the parade coverage. First of all is the fact that the coverage is simply awful year in and year out. Second is that the Fancy Brigades are no longer a part of the parade. They used to be my favorite part of the parade. Now they don't perform on Broad Street and they don't even get covered on tv. I'm not sure why this is, but I hate it.

As for the coverage... Oh.. It's simply painful. First off, I love the parade and I 'get' it more than the average viewer. I can honestly say that if I didn't get the parade and saw it on tv I would be completely puzzled as to why it was on at all. The tv coverage is technically bad (sound, camera angles, etc), the entertainment value is terrible, the informational content is non-existant and the commantary (while being a strong point) is not as good as it could be either.

My point here is that if we are trying to make the parade more popular (or the city in general) we need to improve the coverage by a huge amount. The parade is a Philadelphia treasure and something that we should cherish and publisize, but we simply drop the ball every year and it's sad.

I used to be in tv production and I know that I could produce the telecast better than the goodballs at channel 17. That leads me to believe that the city could find someone currently working in the business that could do it better. Why aren't they?