Ja­nine Charles-Far­ray

The road to get­ting the hit re­al­i­ty show Bad Granny on lo­cal TV start­ed with a dare.To hear Ja­son Reese tell the ori­gin sto­ry of Bad Granny, the dare was dished out by com­pa­ny di­rec­tor/TV show pro­duc­er Stephanie Pem­ber­ton one day af­ter she saw Reese's truck get flipped over on an of­froad Las Cuevas beach run. The en­tire Bad Granny ven­ture is Pem­ber­ton's brain­child, he said."Steph is re­al­ly the back­bone for all of this. I just love cars. My mom says since I was born, I've been play­ing with cars." Falling in love with the idea of a mon­ster jeep of her own, Pem­ber­ton was stunned to learn that Reese had ac­tu­al­ly built his truck from scratch and had been build­ing cars since the age of 16. Thus the dare was born.

That event in Oc­to­ber 2012 sparked a fast, fu­ri­ous and al­most sur­re­al eight-month jour­ney that took Reese, Ja­son Co­mach and Jesse Lee Lum from ca­su­al friends to busi­ness part­ners, cus­tomis­ing cars un­der the Bad Granny com­pa­ny name, and lat­er on cre­at­ing the TV show.Pem­ber­ton sought out a sec­ond-hand jeep to cus­tomise in­to her dream ride, but in a mo­ment of pan­ic and buy­er's re­morse, the con­di­tion of the jeep put a sig­nif­i­cant damper on her ex­pec­ta­tions. How­ev­er, over the next few months, Reese valiant­ly set about re­build­ing the soft-top Jim­ny. That led to his re­con­nect­ing with Co­mach, and what be­gan as sim­ple patch job on a rust­ed chas­sis es­ca­lat­ed in­to new tyres, rims, fan­cy colour-spray­ing with stick­er wrap­ping and a cus­tom-fit and stretched cov­er, all while keep­ing the costs down through re­fit­ting, cus­tom build­ing and re­fur­bish­ing.

The col­lab­o­ra­tion sparked in­no­va­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty and ca­ma­raderie that re­sult­ed in a lev­el of ser­vice, skill and at­ten­tion to de­tail un­usu­al in T&T car mod­i­fi­ca­tion shops. In No­vem­ber the com­pa­ny was in­cor­po­rat­ed and the work­ing re­la­tion­ship be­tween "Jesse and the Ja­sons" in­spired a busi­ness mod­el out of which Bad Granny the com­pa­ny and the re­al­i­ty TV show was born.In spite of some ini­tial pro­duc­tion chal­lenges, the first episode, Bad Granny Freezes Over, was filmed by James O'Con­nor and the Jtog­ra­phy film crew two weeks be­fore Car­ni­val 2013. On May 25, the world pre­miere was aired on TV6 to con­sid­er­able so­cial me­dia buzz and rave re­views.Ac­cord­ing to Pem­ber­ton, the re­sponse to the on­line up­load of the episode was even greater. "The suc­cess of the show has on­ly been pos­si­ble be­cause of the fans–es­pe­cial­ly on Face­book, YouTube and oth­er so­cial me­dia. The re­sponse has been re­al­ly great."

Cre­at­ing a tele­vi­sion prod­uct loved by its fan base has as­sist­ed with the chal­lenges of get­ting the show on lo­cal TV."With spon­sors, they don't want to back any­thing un­less it's a suc­cess. Un­less it's out there and peo­ple like it, it's not go­ing to get fund­ed–and, of course, you have to start small." With over 12,000 and more "likes" on Face­book and more than 7,000 views of the first episode on­line, all signs show the Bad Granny mo­men­tum is grow­ing. Lever­ag­ing that grow­ing au­di­ence in­to fund­ing re­mains one of Bad Granny's main goals."The mar­ket­ing side of the show with spon­sors has been tough," Pem­ber­ton said. "That's how busi­ness works in Trinidad. When we re­alised we had to pay for the air­time we de­cid­ed that the way we are do­ing it is by get­ting spon­sors to pay for pro­duc­tion and air­time and we'll do the rest our­selves."The show, with a new di­rec­tor in Mar­cus Gomez, has of­fi­cial­ly moved to CNC3. The con­tin­u­a­tion of sea­son one in­volves a spe­cial Tri­umph cus­tom-build, plus more cars, trucks and a mys­tery per­son­al­i­ty who will be join­ing one of the shows to add some "girl pow­er" to the team.

Episode two of the show, Bad Granny gets Beezee, is sched­uled to air on Au­gust 29 on CNC3, with fol­low-up post­ings of each episode on the Bad Granny Face­book page.