Peter Igho: Producing legacy programmes responsible for my success in NTA

Many Nigerian adults who grew up in the mid-70s would readily remember the drama series known as Cock Crow At Dawn that showed on the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), and the joy it brought to families as they stayed glued to their television sets in their living rooms. In this interview, Olorogun Peter Igho, the legendary master storyteller goes us down memory lane and tells ONWUKA NZESHI how talent, passion, creativity and hard work resulted in a great feat that has left an indelible mark on the tube

You celebrated your 75th birthday anniversary recently, but you don’t look 75. What’s the magic?
Well, I’ve heard that many times. I’m happy and I thank God for that. But even when I woke up on that morning and I looked at myself in the mirror, I asked myself: Are you truly 75? Because I don’t really feel 75. I’m a very restless person and all my friends know me for that; I never go anywhere and sit down to watch things happen. I have to be part of it. I have to go out there to make things work or make things better. I’m like a road runner. I can’t sit in one place for a long time; that has been my nature from childhood. So, I’m happy that I’ve kept myself busy because in the end, it has helped me over the years. I’ve always said that – he who rests, rusts and of course, success comes to he who moves. I have imbibed that philosophy myself.
I play golf and even at my age now, when I want things done, I don’t sit down and call somebody to do it. If I wait two minutes, I go and get it done myself and that has helped me keep my body working and youthful

Do you think it is a function of your genes or lifestyle?
I think it is a matter of lifestyle. Also, my philosophy is that I will give my best in every situation, but when I’ve done my best, even if it doesn’t work, I don’t sit back and cry over what has happened. I take whatever lessons I ought to take from that non-success experience and I move on. I always joke by saying that I sleep with my two eyes closed because I keep malice with nobody. I don’t carry grudges against people and I try to be the best I can honestly without creating enemies. So like I said, I sleep with my two eyes closed. I don’t carry any pressure to bed. When I get to my bed, I’m tired and I sleep.
Many people are compelled by one health condition or the other to take some medication before they can sleep, eat or work. I don’t allow anything or medication to hold me to ransom. I try to live independent of all these things.

Don’t you think you’re just blessed with good health?
Well, I thank God for the blessing. I think that it may also be in the gene because my father lived up to his old age and in his 90s, he was still very agile. The Igho family are a restless people. They’re always on the move. I thank God for everything.

How did you feel among friends at your birthday bash?
Actually, when I got to 75, I didn’t plan to celebrate. I just wanted something very quiet, I didn’t know that my friends were working in the background. The party you referred to was a surprise party. Idi Farouk came with Otunba Runsewe to pick me up at my house. They said since I was not celebrating, they wanted to take me out for dinner with their wives. I told them my daughter was around and asked them: Can I bring my daughter along? They said: Yes. I said but my daughter has three kids, they said it doesn’t matter. She had to come with her three kids.
Later, I discovered that they were all part of the plan. They, my daughter and my other children, knew about the party and they brought my wife from Lagos without my knowledge. It was later I discovered that it was my son who arranged the tickets and all that and they didn’t let me know even though we were in the same house. I didn’t even know that my wife was in town. So, till that point it was a surprise. I really was taken by surprise. I didn’t invite anybody; they did all the invitations.

You’re a household name, yet not many people know where you come from as we say it in Nigeria. Where do you hail from?
Well, I recall that when I went to the University of Ibadan, I attended the meeting of Northerners, I attended the meeting of the Deltans and I also attended the meeting of the Igbos. I was attending all of them and it was confusing for many of them.
But truly, I was born in Jos. My father was a tin miner and an Urhobo. My mother was also an Urhobo. They are not just Urhobo, she and my father are from the same village, Kokori in Delta State. My father was taken to Jos by another older miner, just as a young boy and of course, he was there when he married my mother. So, I and all my mother’s children were born in Jos and because Jos was a cosmopolitan place, the compound we lived in as we grew up in Jos, had about seven Igbo families.
We were the only non- Igbo family in the compound. So, I didn’t learn Igbo; I grew up speaking the language because all the children we played with, even in school, were Igbos. I attended a Catholic Primary School and most of the teachers were Igbos. Even there in school, we played and sang Igbo songs. Hausa, of course, everybody was speaking Hausa. So, I grew up speaking Hausa and Igbo. It was my native language, Urhobo that I had to learn because when my parents would talk to us, we would reply in Hausa or Igbo and they would slap us and say: ‘Come on, speak Urhobo.’ So, in the end that helped me because when later, I got to the South and met some of my relatives, I spoke better Urhobo than them because there in Delta, most of them spoke Pidgin English. They were even surprised. But the Urhobo community is well known for preserving their language by passing it on to their children.

How were your early years at school?
I grew up in Jos, went to Primary School in Jos, but went to Secondary School in Kaduna. While in Secondary School, I was good in English and I won what was then called JF Kennedy Essay Competition. The competition used to hold every year. They were both School Winners and National Winners. I was the winner from my school and I became friends with one Abdulaziz who won in Government College, Kaduna. Both of us later attended the University of Ibadan, but we got to know through that essay competition.
In those days, you can’t finish Secondary or Higher School in December and go straight to the university in January. When you finish, you have to teach or do other work until September because the university admissions were in September. So, I taught in the same school where I finished from – St John’s College (now Rimi College) Kaduna.
But one thing happened while I was there. Maybe because I was good in English Language, I was covering every sports activity and sending the reports to my brother who was in New Nigeria and they were publishing them.
When I was about to leave for the university, my principal said that I should organise a drama competition among the halls. I went to the market and bought drama books like the Incorruptible Judge by Olu Olagoke and other plays that were available at that time. We were short by one play; I couldn’t get it to buy in the market and I went to tell the principal. He said to me: You write well, why don’t you write a play to fill the gap. I said: How can I write a play? He said, well you have vivid imagination and you can do it. So, I wrote something and because we were a bit late in starting, as I wrote each page, they will take and by the time I finished, I had created a story. Then, I left for the university.
Later, the Principal called me and said: Your play came first and that they brought people from the American Embassy to come and be part of the panel of judges during the drama performance. So, I said to myself: So, I can write!

How did you transform from a school teacher who loves drama and dances to a television personality?
Of course, when we came back, after three years, they wanted to retain me in Culture because of our success story. But at that time, television was just coming and the Northwest State was trying to set up its own television station. So, I said instead of Culture, I’ll rather go to the television.
At that time, new states were created and it was now Sokoto State. It was then known as NTV, Sokoto. Again, I pioneered something else there. Apart from being a pioneer member, I was the Head of the Drama Department and the only staff in that department. I had to use my other staff as cast for our programmes. I was in charge of Hausa and English Language Drama. At that time, there were no recording facilities. It was live in the studio. When you entered the studio, you were on and beamed live to the viewers at home. It was live until the programme ended and they went back to News and other programmes. There were no recorded programmes at that time. It was a live, stage drama. You can imagine the workload for one doing both Hausa and English drama. Again, while we were there, we started of course from scratch.
In those days, there were no professional actors unlike now where you have actors and actresses. What we did was that you wrote your play and you go round looking for somebody who will play each role. They come for auditions, you select your actors and if they are working, you have to arrange with them on how to get permission from their workplace or you wait for them to close from work before you do your rehearsals.
Again, NTV Sokoto was not a purpose- built television station. It was just a warehouse that they turned into a television station. They just cleared the place and said go and make your television there. It had a very low roof which didn’t allow for proper professional lighting. But we started doing our drama in those studios.
Don’t forget, at that time too, the existing drama before we came on board were the Village Headmaster produced in Western Nigeria Television, Lagos; Masquerade coming from Eastern Nigeria Television and Samanja, coming from the North. These were the three major drama programmes coming from the various regions.
Then we started producing our own just like every other station across the 12 states. In Benin, they had Hotel De Jordan; Kaduna they had another programme in Hausa. So, every station was producing their own but because we didn’t have standard studios, I didn’t like the confines of that studio. We had only the News Camera and there were no special cameras for video. So, we use the same news camera to shoot clips and process it in the news laboratory. We then use the clips as inserts in our programme.

So, very soon, I started moving my programmes outside the studios and by the time the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) was formed in 1977, I was doing a lot of our drama outside the studios. I was recording most of the clips outside the studios and bringing them as inserts into the studio recordings.
As NTA came into existence, all of us now came under one umbrella and NTV Sokoto became NTA Sokoto. In order to showcase the oneness of the organisation, NTA now organised a Drama Competition among all the stations and I wrote, produced and directed a play called The Moment of Truth from NTA Sokoto. It was a very powerful story because I always looked at what could be relevant to the environment.
So, the “Moment of Truth” had to do with a man who was entitled to four wives but was so dedicated to the one wife that he had even though they had no child. They waited about five years without a child. He didn’t really mind because he believed that God would do it at his own time. But you know women, whenever she goes to the hairdressing salon to make her hair, the other women will be gossiping and she knows that they are talking about her. She would hear them saying that some women as young girls would go and damage themselves, committing abortion and later when they are married, they can’t have children. So, she knows that they were talking about her. Once in a while, someone would drag her to a Babalawo to see if they can make her have children. When her husband found out that she had gone to such a place, he was very angry. But he had a friend, a doctor who had a daughter and the little girl was always coming to spend time with the woman. You know it is believed that when a woman does not have a child, when a child from another home is always close to her, she has hope of getting her own child too.
So, she took that child as her own. She will take her to school, bring her home, cook for her and do every other thing. The mother wouldn’t even see her daughter. Even when she goes to her real home and asks her mother for something, she would say: Leave me alone. Go and meet your mother.
Anyway, half way through the story, surprise surprise, God in his infinite mercy came to her aid and she became pregnant. She came home one day and the little girl was with her when she collapsed and luckily, the doctor was around so he checked her and found that she was pregnant.
All through the pregnancy, the little girl was living with her and when it came to the time she wanted to have her baby, it turned out that it was through a caesarean section and it was this same family doctor that had to do it. However, because of some complications, he says that she would never have another child. She really didn’t mind because at least she now had a child. So, the husband organised a big party to celebrate. While the celebration was going on, they came and told the mother that the child had developed some high temperature. She goes and checks and the doctor said ‘don’t worry, she’ll be okay.’
She goes back to the party but before long, she was called again that it was getting worse and they found out that the umbilical cord had been infected and they applied some antibiotics. Everybody goes home leaving the child and the mother. The woman goes to her husband and informed him that: Look, the condition of the child is getting worse. Let’s call another doctor. The man said: which doctor? This is the best doctor in town. The wife said; I agree his good but you know that he has been all over the place. How are you sure he will be sane enough to handle this emergency? He said no. Even though they called him Chop Life Doctor, he knows what he is doing. He sends for the doctor but as the doctor arrived, he heard the scream of the woman. He’s dead! He’s dead! She runs down and grabs the doctor shouting. You’ve killed my baby! You’ve killed my baby! Then she’s caught in this violent storm.
Now remember, I mentioned to you that we didn’t have professional actors and I found out that among all the plays I had watched, when they cry in the course of a performance, the way they cry makes you laugh because it doesn’t come naturally. But I wanted people to cry when this woman loses her baby. I wanted people to watch her cry and to also cry with her.
At that time, I felt that in a moment like that you have to use nature, the elements to help. The moment she screams, I cut to the outside of the house, there is a violent storm, heavy rain, thunder and lightning. Then, inside the husband is going around, asking: Where are you? Where are you? She is not in the house and he comes out of the house to see her rolling on the ground, outside in the rain. He runs out and finds her in the garden, crying and rolling on the ground. He goes to meet her in the rain but you cannot differentiate the tears from the rain. When he goes to pick her up, I put in Bongos Ikwue’s ‘What’s Gonna Be, Is Gonna Be, What goes up must come down. What’s Gonna Be Is Gonna Be. There’s nothing you can do about it.’
When we get to that scene, everybody breaks down. You don’t see her cry but I did all that to symbolise the storm in her heart. Now, when this entry went into the competition, we came first. So, all the judges wanted to know how we were able to do it. They kept asking: You produced it in Sokoto in the dry season, where did you get your rain from? Even if you got the rain, where was the camera crew? Where did you place them? So that was what stood me head and shoulders above the others. It was the natural effect brought onto the production that gave it the edge. Before then, it was all studio productions. Don’t forget, The Village Headmaster was always about the Oloja’s Palace, Sisi Ckara’s shop, everything was in the studio. In the Masquerade too, everything was in the studio. The same with Samanja, it was mostly in the studio and occasionally in the barracks at the CO’s Office. This was the first time they were seeing not just natural effects but a dramatic display with the elements of nature.

How did you really achieve that feat?
What I did was when we were preparing for that production, I went to the Fire Brigade and I said: Can I borrow your van? They said what are you doing? Is there a fire? I said no and explained what I was going to do with it. I asked them to fill the truck with water and park at a strategic location. Two of their men would hold the water hoses from two different ends and when I saw action they released the water to come down like rainfall. Of course, I had bought the special effects for thunder and lightning.
So that was how we started, entered the competition and won in 1978. Thereafter, NTA said: Look, we have to start building a network studio and to do this, we have to bring the best from every station. I was now taken from Sokoto to Lagos.
You’ll recall that when I was posted to Bida, some of my friends said what is in Bida? Why should you accept such a posting? I said no. The chick that will grow to be a cock, in God’s time, will get there no matter the thunderstorm and lightning. So, from that Bida, we got to a point where the world noticed me and moved me to Sokoto and from NTA Sokoto to the NTA Headquarters in Lagos.
About that same time, I got to Lagos, NTA wanted to produce a drama series that will be focused on Agriculture and because I was the producer of the winning entry, I was asked to come a produce the new series and that is what led to Cock Crow At Dawn. It was first ever drama series of the NTA and the first drama series shot entirely on location, not in the studios, but entirely on location. It was the first drama series to have its own production equipment; the first drama series to have its own composed theme song which was Bongos Ikwue’s Cock Crow At Dawn.

Will he ever get there?
Will he ever make it?

Will he ever hear the sound, of the Cock Crow At Dawn?
So, all that again became the beginning of another chapter.

In all these years, were there some low moments?
Yes. Let’s not give the impression that it was all rosy throughout all these years. When we started working at NTA Sokoto, the station would tell you they don’t have a budget for this and that so when you want to start a project, they will give you a little budget. But because I wanted to prove a point, I wanted to make my plays look realistic, I went the extra mile. If I have a scene that should take place in a room, I try to make it look like a proper room. I’ll go to my house, take the curtains, get a carpenter to use some plywood boards to redesign the room. I’ll go to Kaduna and buy wallpaper and put them on the walls. When you saw my interiors, they were very realistic. If it requires food, I’ll call my wife: is my lunch ready? If she says yes, I’ll say bring it and we will use it. So, when the management saw me doing all that, when I asked for something, they gave me because they had seen results. This is why I tell people that when you want to do a project don’t go demanding everything before you start. You start with what you have and when they see what you are doing and are working, the rest will follow. That has been my guiding principle.

Some time ago, you talked about reviving that programme. Why did you want it revived and how far have you gone?
Well, I didn’t just want to revive it. Like I told you, I loved drama on television and when I joined the television service, Village Headmaster was one of my favourite programmes. It was produced from Lagos. I loved Masquerade and I loved Samanja. Of course, growing up in the North then, these were the plays showing on television.
So, when I became General Manager in 1983, one of the things I agreed with my boss (MD) at that time, Abdulrahman Michika, was that we’ll change them from being local programmes to make them network programmes. So, I had rented a place in Badagry and camped the actors of the Village Headmaster and that was where they were producing. We now made it a location – based programme instead of being just studio based. We moved them out of the studios.
We did the same with Masquarade; we got them a place in Enugu and that was where all the subsequent episodes were shot. The same thing with Samanja. We made them true to life instead of keeping the programmes within the confines of the studios. But we now differentiated the old ones from the new episodes and that’s why we now called them New Village Headmaster, New Masquerade and New Samanja. These names came up when we took over at the network level.

Did you then re- shoot the earlier episodes of these programmes at the new locations?
No. We didn’t have to re- shoot them. We just continued the stories from where they stopped but now shooting the new episodes on location. Now, over the years, those programmes had become classics and many people keep contacting NTA to ask for these old programmes. If you go to the BBC, Coronation Studios, all their old programmes are still running.
So NTA tested the waters with Village Headmaster which is still on air now. I think it is being sponsored by Glo and running now on the NTA.
Then, they called me back to say “we have a strong demand for other legacy programmes including Masquerade and Samanja and we want to start with Cock Crow At Dawn. So, we had a meeting and we’ve signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) so that we can quickly start working on the project. We are talking to sponsors now. But it is not going to be exactly like the old Cock Crow At Dawn.