TELEVISION: Luke Alfred
EVEN on the telephone Mark Gillman is all you expect him to be. As he lolls in the bath somewhere in Cape Town, the presenter of NNTV’s Livewire is likeably egocentric, just as he is on the little blue screen. Gillman is the shape of things to come in television: cosmopolitan, manic, opinionated in a juvenile kind of way, but he is fresh, he has style, and his name isn’t Cliff Saunders.
Wednesday night’s Livewire is a hit-and-miss teen programme which not only features various “controversial” discussion topics (animal rights, legalisation of marijuana and so on) but also contains moments of pure fleshcreep.
Take the ongoing episode within the show which features a racially diverse batch of twentysomethings trying to live communally. In a recent episode the commune was about to have a bridge-building party but the decisions that needed to be made in order to organise it provoked resentment and unhappiness. What followed was anguish, confession and naked teen anger — and it made for great viewing.
Livewire is perhaps too eclectic for its own good, and it is prone to confuse energy with substance, but it does have one thing in its favour: it encourages people to have their say.
Gillman, in fact, is devoted to the idea that studio guests should have their say no matter how dumb or unfashionable their opinions. He is stunned at the lack of nous which his TV guests and audiences have broughts to his show.
“People do not realise what is actually happening when you are sitting on that set,” Gillman tells me. “They do not realise that these Star-Wars type animals that are rolling round on the floor looking at you are actually filming … This was brought across to me by an American guy who said to me once, he can’t believe the reaction of some of the people that we try and talk to: `cos back in the States people would just kill for a chance to go near a TV camera.”
Before a chance meeting with producer Diony Kempen in London one day, Gillman was hosting a late-night Radio Good Hope talk show, learning to negotiate the fine line between irreverence and insult. Radio remains his first love, a medium on which he can play Riders on the Storm and indulge all his juvenile fantasies, but a medium which ultimately has the potential — this is what really interests Gillman — to change people’s heads.
Unlike radio, television is more structured and scripted, but that’s not to say he doesn’t by his own admission love being in front of the cameras. He even admits that on Livewire they’ve had some heated and memorable programmes, although he says he’s loathe to divide shows into good and bad.
“The show that we did for Christmas for example, which had me prancing around in a Santa Claus suit. One of my guests that night was Mzwakhe Mbuli — the guy who read the poem at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration.
“And that show wasn’t necessarily a great show, but just having him on the set, and just the way in which we did the show, which was certainly toned-down from my point- of-view for a Christmas thing, I thought the whole thing seemed very genuine …”
While conceding that he and the entire Livewire crew are on a learning curve, he’s seen enough of the “reformed” SABC’s internal circuitry to be jaundiced. He has the following to say about the Brazil-type organisation in Auckland Park: “TV is too controlled by people in offices who push pens: Oh, no, we don’t like that; `Oh no, we don’t like that’,” or, “Livewire finds itself in a situation where there are too many chiefs running around, wanting to have their say.”
Having accumulated hands-on experience in both television and radio, Gillman is ideally placed to comment on the changes poised to sweep the industry.
He believes that besides the educational worth of television, it has a role in bringing home to people that their opinions have validity. This can only be done if television becomes “less centralised and less nationalised”.
As far as radio is concerned, although he is “optimistic” about the future, he does have a cautionary tale: “It just saddens me that South Africa is now maybe going to skip a period of development. For example — and to go back to radio now — if you think about how the United States went from state broadcasting, to the emergence of millions of pirates and the granting of local licences, and as a result of all those pirates a lot of small independent licences being granted.
“And it saddens me to think that South Africa is going to go from state broadcaster to a whole lot of independents but most of those independents will be owned — and this is the great South African way — by big corporations or fat cats anyway.”