For five years now, Tropika’s been sending a handful of local celebrities and consumers to an island paradise to compete against each other for a million bucks. They call this the Tropika Island of Treasure and they’ve sent everyone from Joey Rasdien to Tracy McGregor to take part in challenges on white beaches and in blue waters. Lucky bastards. This show airs on SABC 1 and what this means none times out of 10 is that there’s a good reason to watch beautiful people swim, run and roll around in the sand in next-to-nothing. Plenty of nearly-bare ass and sideboob for everyone can enjoy.

This year though, Tropika’s gone a different route. As part of the lead-up to their show, they’ve pushed things off in a different, maybe more interesting direction, launching Kagiso’s Island of Treasure, a web series that works as a prelude to the main event. The 10-episode series stars local comedian Kagiso Lediga (the oke who pulled a prawn out of Lady Gaga in Die Antwoord’s last video) on a trip to Jamaica to shoot his own ultra-low budget show and prove he’s better than the Island of Treasure 5’s real host, DJ Fresh.

For my money, Kagiso’s got more personality anyway so he automatically makes for a good choice. Episode 1 works kind of like an intro to the whole series, being set in his agent’s office, but there’s promise of future episodes taking him all over Jamaica. This first one’s basically just him sitting in there with his agent talking about how Tropika’s turned him down. Thankfully the product placement stuff is kept to a minimum and there’s no sign of the brand strangling the show, at least not in this first episode.

The episode’s sweet and short, but there are definitely some ups and downs when it comes to the humour in this thing, with lots of funny bits diving directly into some less effective jokes. Kagiso pulls the whole thing off pretty well but there are some weird directing and scripting choices. Don’t get us wrong, we’re still keen for the next one. If for nothing else than to check out this ex-Miss Jamaica Rosina Casserly that he is going looking for by the end of the episode. Let’s wait and see where this goes.

We’ll bring you a new episode of Kagiso’s Island of Treasure every week for the next 10 weeks in the lead-up to the launch of the Tropika Island of Treasure 5 on SABC 1. You can also check them out on Youtube over at Tropika’s channel.

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