While the cap­i­tal city is usu­al­ly ac­cus­tomed to see­ing thou­sands of spec­ta­tors com­ing to wit­ness J’Ou­vert, that was not the case this time around in down­town Port-of-Spain, as the crowd yes­ter­day could on­ly be de­scribed as sparse.

As a re­sult, Port-of-Spain May­or Chin­ua Al­leyne promised the city cor­po­ra­tion would spend more en­er­gy on mar­ket­ing the fes­tiv­i­ties to en­sure crowds re­turn to the venue.

Be­fore the start of the rev­el­ry at 4 am, there was a heavy po­lice pres­ence which saw the num­ber of law en­force­ment of­fi­cers out­num­ber­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic.

Half an hour be­fore the of­fi­cial start of J’Ou­vert, the TTPS and De­fence Force placed a check­point near the Light House in down­town Port-of- Spain, where they were stop­ping rev­ellers en­ter­ing the city and per­form­ing search­es.

J’Ou­vert be­gan with tra­di­tion­al mas­quer­aders com­ing to the venue, where they per­formed to a very small crowd on the pave­ment and less than ten peo­ple seat­ed in the Lord Kitch­en­er Stand.

When the ques­tion of dwin­dling spec­ta­tors for an­oth­er year was posed to May­or Al­leyne, he said, “You would no­tice that we made some changes to the lay­out of the stage this year. Pre­vi­ous­ly, the judges were at a sep­a­rate stage a lit­tle low­er down the street and the spec­ta­tors were in the stands, so we’ve brought the spec­ta­tors and the judges back to­geth­er and that’s one of the things we’re work­ing on to con­tin­ue to im­prove the prod­uct we’re of­fer­ing here in down­town.”

He con­tin­ued, “It’s some very good mas, so we just need to put some more ef­fort be­hind some of the mar­ket­ing for the prod­uct. Once we’ve com­plet­ed some of the re­forms, we’re en­gaged in.”

He said young peo­ple need­ed to be en­cour­aged to take an in­ter­est in mas.  

“I think we need to ex­pose them more and on Sun­day, you would have seen the Cub Scout troops come out for Kid­dies Car­ni­val, you would have seen some schools come out as well,” Al­leyne said.

But the ole mas yes­ter­day had some­thing for every­one—com­i­cal, hu­mor­ous, and cre­ative.

Richard Mon­tano, who por­trayed Dee Pee Pee Not Charg­ing D CoP, won J’Ou­vert King this year.

He told re­porters that he has been look­ing for­ward to the crown for over 60 years, as he has been play­ing ole mas since he was 12. He placed sec­ond on four oc­ca­sions.

“But I am so hap­py to win this J’Ou­vert, I trav­elled a long way to play this mas ... from Flori­da and I’ve been fol­low­ing the me­dia with the prob­lem with the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice and the DPP and I said I can equate this mas to have an im­pact on the news and I hope it is dis­played prop­er­ly, I en­joyed it and I’m hav­ing a very good Car­ni­val, so my trip down here was worth it,” Mon­tano said.

The Queen of J’Ou­vert was Lav­erne Smith, who por­trayed Not in the Dou­bles Comess but Ah Want Ah Job at Dou­ble Palm.

Smith said the in­spi­ra­tion to por­tray this was due to the con­tro­ver­sy with Ja­maican dance­hall artiste Bee­nie Man talk­ing bad about T&T’s dou­bles.

“I didn’t want to go back to dou­bles, dou­bles, dou­bles, so I just shift­ed it to dou­bles and dou­ble palm. That was the in­spi­ra­tion right there. You don’t come and bad talk about our street food, no Bee­nie, no.”

She was asked what could be done to bring more young peo­ple to watch and even par­tic­i­pate in the King and Queen of J’Ou­vert com­pe­ti­tions.

She rec­om­mend­ed go­ing to schools and con­duct­ing pro­grammes to en­cour­age young peo­ple to get in­volved.