Do not adjust your set. The image is changing. Maria McCloy on a fresher generation of South African television presenters
REMEMBER the days when everything on TV, including shows aimed at the younger generation, was hosted by 40-year-olds with matching shirts and cheesy grins? When the music shows were presented by blonde English wannabees and there were no funky women like Vinoliah Mashego in sight? Well, all that had to change at some stage.
Gina Benjamin trains presenters. She thinks today’s presenters have the advantage of being exposed to TV all their lives, so are articulate and daring enough to play games with the camera; use an “upfront in your face style” acting as if the camera they’re talking to is a person. Her generation was brought up within the stodgy confines of BBC and SABC radio, where the presenter maintained a healthy neutral distance from the viewer.
Twenty-four-year-old Options presenter Nkensanyi Manganyi is grateful she doesn’t have to sit smiling sweetly in a studio week after week reading someone else’s lines. Her young director and producers changed the scope of the show through different topics and camera angles; they allow the women to contribute ideas and be themselves.
Big World Goes Africa (and Europe) wasn’t only a great experience for Isaac Chokwe because he got to travel, but because for the first time he got to have a say in things like camera angles, content and script. He’s dedicated to hip-hop and he is animated as he describes the rhyming and breakdancing battles they used to have as kids, how he ended up learning things unconsciously because he wanted to improve his language and poetry skills to beat the other boys -and that’s how he feels “edutainment TV” should be.
He says the point of Big World was to educate South Africans who think they’re not part of Africa; to expel all the inaccurate stereotypes about the continent.
Twenty-two-year-old Zam Nkosi is the popular presenter of Selimanthuzi and he’s pulled it off best and had fun because he’s allowed to be himself. Talk Talk, Shell Road To Fame (watch out for their new presenter TeeKay) and now Selimanthuzi are shows aimed at capturing young audiences and they all benefit from the ad lib situation. To Nkosi, rigid routine kills any sort of vibe a talented presenter may have.
Obviously young people know what their peers want to see. So instead of Ms Bouffant Hair in the pastel-coloured studio we have Michelle Constant talking to the camera above her while she lies on a bed; we have Chokwe interviewing regular young people, not officials; we have him rapping while Congolese musicians make the music on the back of a donkey cart. We have Nkosi interviewing the Boom Shakas and Romeo Khumalos of the world and poking around their wardrobes and fridges.
But are enough young people in control of TV yet? Nkosi echoes the others: “There are a lot of people at the door, but very few people sitting at the table who have the influence to make decisions.” Inside Info’s Nomonde Gongxeka also believes there aren’t yet enough shows made by young people who “are in that situation, so can identify with the youth”.
Manganyi says the danger of older people creating shows they think are funky is “pseudo funk”. Even though shows like Options and Top Billing now have younger presenters, she thinks young people are still typecast and squeezed into lime-green and orange outfits, given directions to be hyper-active and smile a lot on a high-tech luminous couch. Gongxeka says that before Inside Info made it on to the screen, people kept telling them young people didn’t care about anything serious.
Zakes Mda, author and TV critic, believes Inside Info “does much more than the adult programmes of that nature … they’re quite daring …they go out where angels fear to tread in a much more in-depth manner. The production itself is creatively handled, one suspects a boy like [Khalo] Matabane has a hand in that.” It is up to the four young presenters to write their own scripts and links, get ideas, research and shoot their inserts.
Mda is annoyed with presenters who are “pseudo Americans, who’ve never been to America”. Chokwe is one presenter some people think is good except for the American accent. His speech is coloured with hip-hop slang, but he says: “I don’t sound American, I might here and there, but to me it’s normal English. People say `It sounds American, it’s Model C English’ but it’s just English.” I can spot his interest in theatre when he imitates all sorts of South African accents and then says: “I don’t know what people really want.”
Sometimes it seems that all one needs to be on TV these days is a “private school accent” and a pretty face. But Chokwe, Manganyi and Nkosi are way more than fine presenters with private school accents. They’ve been developing their talent in the industry a while. This is Manganyi’s second presenting job, but she is an actress – she won a Vita award for her role in Sophiatown, was apparently brilliant in The Coloured Museum and has done TV dramas, movie work like Soweto Green and even a stand-up comedy routine.
Benjamin says there is a bias towards hiring black people who have private school accents. Gongxeka can vouch for that: “Production houses are very unfair … if you get someone like me and someone who speaks with a [private school] accent, they’ll assume `oops this person can’t speak English properly’ instead of considering the persons skills, ideas and creativity.”
These presenters don’t intend sitting around waiting for change. Manganyi and Nkosi formed Big Foot Productions, where they aim to create the kind of sitcoms, roles and talkshows they want to watch. Chokwe is hoping a planned M-Net music show materialises so he can focus on hip- hop – he used to be in groups with people on the local rap Muthaload CD and wants to release an album with his group, Culprit Lab. Nongxeka sees herself in production; she already does research for Inside Info and Siphiwe, a programme for the disabled.