Jacquie Golding-Duffy
THE `new-look’ SABC will hit our screens on February 5 when SABC 1, 2 and 3 take over the reins from CCV, TV1 and NNTV respectively. The grand reshuffling of programmes is an attempt to reach particular language groups at the provincial level. The provincial broadcasts will, at first, be half an hour long, from Monday to Friday. But the SABC said it was committed to gradually increasing the airtime to meet the IBA’s recommendation of `an hour a day devoted solely to provincial broadcasts’. Because certain provinces lack television broadcasting infrastructures, clusters have been created whereby two provinces will share a single transmitter. The Free State and Northern Cape will be clustered as a broadcast region, as will Northern Province and Mpumalanga. The remaining provinces will, for the meantime, receive their own provincial broadcasts. The corporation said its basic principle was to `broadcast the language predominant in the particular region’ and also to be unilingual in any one day’s broadcast. The Western Cape region will have two Afrikaans broadcasts per week, two Xhosa and one English. History will be made in the Northern Province/Mpumalanga region where programmes will be broadcast in Venda, Tsonga, Swati and Ndebele for the first time since the inception of television in South Africa. These languages, together with Pedi, English and Afrikaans, will be spread over the five week days. Programme content will vary, covering local news, current affairs, magazine inserts and clips of local entertainment. The SABC also said it would offer a full news service in seven languages: English, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi and Setswana, and would gradually introduce the other official languages of Venda, Tsonga, Ndebele and Swati in special slots and regional programmes. News during primetime would include 12 English bulletins, about four in Zulu, four in Xhosa, five in Afrikaans and three per week each for Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana. The first two regions to receive their own provincial broadcasts at 6pm on February 5 will be the Western Cape and the Northern Province/Mpumalanga. KwaZulu-Natal’s broadcasts will begin in June and the Eastern Cape’s between September and December this year.