Nigel A Camp­bell

The In­ter­na­tion­al So­ca Monarch fi­nal will not be shown live on tele­vi­sion in 2016.This news, which is sure to dis­ap­point fans of the Car­ni­val Fri­day sta­ple, was one of sev­er­al changes an­nounced by Pe­ter Scoon, chair­man of Caribbean Pres­tige Foun­da­tion (CPF), which has host­ed the show for more than 20 years.

Speak­ing at the ISM Artiste Fo­rum at the Hy­att Re­gency on Tues­day evening, Scoon said in try­ing to sell the pro­duc­tion to pay-per-view and ca­ble op­er­a­tors glob­al­ly, CPF was told that the sev­en hour-long fi­nal show was not tele­vi­sion-ready as there were too many gaps be­tween per­for­mances.

As such, there will be no live tele­vi­sion broad­cast, no live pay-per-view and no on­line stream­ing of the fi­nal.Scoon ex­plained the show would be prop­er­ly edit­ed for de­layed broad­cast the next day, Car­ni­val Sat­ur­day, on CNC3 Tele­vi­sion. CPF hopes that, much like in­ter­na­tion­al singing com­pe­ti­tion, The Voice, the re­sults will be an­nounced at the end of the Sat­ur­day broad­cast show.

Scoon al­so an­nounced the scrap­ping of the Groovy and Pow­er so­ca cat­e­gories with com­pe­ti­tion in a sin­gle cat­e­go­ry. This would see a re­turn to the orig­i­nal for­mat which was changed in 2005 with the in­tro­duc­tion of the Groovy so­ca cat­e­go­ry.

The rev­e­la­tion was met with dif­fer­ent re­spons­es from the per­form­ers present at the fo­rum. Some asked if there would be more con­tes­tants in the fi­nal show while oth­ers said the change would auger well be­cause there would be few­er "over- pro­duced" per­for­mances.

In lay­ing out the ra­tio­nale for the change in show for­mat, Scoon said the idea of "groovy be­ing the child of Pow­er" had now been su­per­seded by the re­al­i­ty that the "child has now grown up. Now it is just pure so­ca."Scoon said in its ne­go­ti­a­tion with the Gov­ern­ment, CPF was moot­ing an im­proved prize struc­ture.

He hoped that at least the two top per­form­ers could be­come mil­lion­aires af­ter the fi­nal. Scoon al­so as­sured the artists gath­ered that even the per­former who fin­ished in the last place would be "very hap­py" with his or her prize.It was re­vealed that ne­go­ti­a­tions with cor­po­rate spon­sors were still on­go­ing, in­clud­ing for­mer ma­jor spon­sor, NL­CB. NL­CB is cur­rent­ly with­out a board and that has put those ne­go­ti­a­tions on hold.