Edgar Eriakha is a television presenter, podcast host, actor, and voiceover artist based in Lagos. He presents Wake Up Nigeria and hosts the game show Quick Kash, both on TVC Entertainment. A University of Lagos Creative Arts graduate, Edgar hosts the podcast Why Am I Still Single? with over 130,000 downloads and a fanbase known as the CheckMates. He is also the founder of Ragde Space Limited and runs the multimedia platform checkedgar.com.
Eriakha was not looking for a television career; he says "television found me." In the months before he joined Wake Up Nigeria as a presenter, Edgar was doing what he had always done: creating. He was producing social media content, writing on his blog at checkedgar.com, and running a series that had quietly built him a devoted following. The concept was simple but irresistible: take everything happening on social media and compress it into a movie trailer format. Short, punchy, culturally sharp. People loved it.
"Someone at TVC was watching," he laughed. "Someone reached out to me from TVC asking if I would love to audition for a role as a presenter," Edgar recalled. From social media content creator to TVC Entertainment presenter, his path to Nigerian television was not planned. It was earned. "I had no prior knowledge of broadcasting," he remarked.
Eriakha revealed that his first day presenting was funny. He was nervous and made a lot of mistakes. The nervousness was so visible that viewers assumed it was part of his character, a deliberate comic choice from a man playing a role. In a way, that misreading told him everything he needed to know about his natural instinct for performance. Even his nerves read as entertainment. "I wanted the ground to swallow me," he smiled.
What followed was not a shortcut; it was a masterclass. TVC groomed him, trained him, and gave him the space to learn a craft he had never formally studied. "The learning curve was steep in unexpected ways." His first week on the Wake Up Nigeria set, he did not present at all. He watched from the production control room, observing how the show worked from behind the cameras, studying the rhythm of live television from the inside. Then came the prompter practice. Then the camera-switching drills. Then, finally, his first day presenting live. Wake Up Nigeria airs weekdays on TVC Entertainment from 7:00am to 9:00am. The good thing was that Wake Up Nigeria allows for freedom and style, he added: "That saved me."
The freedom suited him. Before Wake Up Nigeria, he had written commercials for Pulse Nigeria. He had tried his hand at stand-up comedy. He had considered, more than once, whether a life in commercial writing or comedy might be the more honest path. What he discovered on the Wake Up Nigeria set was that none of those roads had been detours. They had all been preparation.
Nowhere is that preparation more visible than in how he handles the unexpected. Live television, Edgar will tell you, is not for the timid. "You have to research, study, and come ready for anything," he said. "The prompter could go off. A guest might wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Something worse. You have to be ready." It is the same lesson his theatre arts training taught him: the performance does not stop because something goes wrong. He remembers the golden rule: "the show must go on." The performance is how you respond when something goes wrong.
Away from Wake Up Nigeria, Edgar hosts Quick Kash, TVC Entertainment's new money game show, where three contestants compete for a jackpot prize of 500,000 naira every Monday and Friday at 1:30pm. He also hosts Why Am I Still Single?, a comedy podcast with over 128,000 downloads and a fanbase known as the CheckMates, built on the running joke and occasionally painful truth that Edgar is a single man. Does that reputation follow him onto the television set? He smiled: "I would not say it hurts. I feel it helps. My problem becomes more public and with thousands of viewers, I am sure my problem will be solved in quick time." He paused then added: "It does not hurt, it amplifies my TV presenting. Except for days my co-host decides to throw jabs. I am actually fine."
His mother, a poultry farmer in Ibadan, has her own relationship with his career. She is proud, Edgar said. She does not listen to the podcast because she is not that patient, but she watches him on television. Live performances, she understands. A son on screen, she can celebrate. The podcast about being single she is choosing, for now, to ignore. Quick Kash airs every Monday and Friday at 1:30pm.
