The new head of SABC’s Current Affairs has already made a start at revamping the division, reports Jacquie Golding-Duffy
SARAH CROWE (37) has been the head of the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) Current Affairs division for just more than a month now, but she has already begun to make her mark.
If she’s not discussing possible changes with television editor-in-chief Joe Thloloe, she is busy revamping some of the current affairs programmes and implementing changes that she has managed to push through the SABC’s bureaucracy.
The first move Crowe made within days of taking up her seat was to “implement a decision taken by channel heads” to pull the plug on Sylvia Vollenhoven’s Sunday night Focus programme because of an “overload of current affairs programmes on Sundays”.
The other current affairs programmes flighted on Sunday evenings are Two Way, Max du Preez’s Truth and Reconciliation Special and On Camera.
SABC insiders allege that the reason for cancelling Vollenhoven’s programme was its poor audience ratings (AR), averaging about three ARs. A good rating would be about eight ARs or more.
With Focus scrapped, Crowe plans to sport a new look for Current Affairs in 1997. She wants to reshuffle time slots, revamp programmes and focus them more on human interest or make them more controversial and racy. She also aims to reassess presenters and send them off for further training in behind-the-scenes production.
Crowe has a long history in broadcasting. She was bureau chief and Africa correspondent for BSkyB’s Sky News; she also worked for the BBC, independently produced several documentaries and was a print journalist for a couple of British broadsheets. Locally she worked for a variety of publications including the Daily Dispatch and the Diamond Fields Advertiser.
During 1986, at the time of the Kinross disaster, Crowe was hauled over the coals by the BBC for singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and holding high a clenched fist. She made headline news when City Press ran a front- page editorial with a banner headline which read: “BBC – Bring Back Crowe”. She was temporarily suspended, later reinstated and compensated with about R6 000.
In September this year, Crowe replaced Ameen Akhalwaya who left the SABC about two years ago.
Constantly bubbling over with ideas and an enthusiasm like that of an artist about to mould something new and different, Crowe strongly believes that quality should override quantity.
“There is so much that can be done to improve current affairs on SABC and make it entertaining while at the same time educational and informative. We are striving towards fewer programmes but better ones.”
Of Irish descent, Crowe and her husband, a Swedish financial journalist, have two children. “Time is very tight when I get home. There is supper to be made, children to be bathed and, of course, current affairs programmes to be watched. I spend quality time with my children. I don’t want to sound clichd. But it is a balancing act.”
Despite having come in cold to a news division that had not been managed by anyone since Akhalwaya’s departure, she has quickly found her feet.
She recently instituted a new programme called Focus on Africa which is aired on Tuesday afternoons in English and Thursday evenings in the Sotho languages. This programme aims to put South African viewers in touch with what’s happening on the rest of the continent, says Crowe. “It is about time that we made our mark on this continent.”
Focus on Africa is one of many of Crowe’s ideas for Current Affairs, and the first to see the light of day. What a Question is another, where ordinary people could pose questions to a panel of politicians. She’d also like to see an international current affairs programme on Sundays that would keep local viewers in touch with news abroad. “Almost like the Sunday newspaper of television,” she says, adding that locals spent far too much time examining their own navels. “But these are just ideas,” she warns, and “have not yet been presented to any of the decision-makers”.
Crowe is quite cautious about what she says, and one cannot blame her because SABC staffers, in general, are wary of each other. As one staffer put it: “You never know what’s going to go down around here. Who’s here today may be gone tomorrow.”
Crowe is respected by her contemporaries as a person who “buckles down and gets the job done without getting people’s backs up”.
She is in charge of seven Focus programmes a week, Good Morning South Africa (which she admits needs attention but she has not had time to get started there), and several other documentaries or films that are offshoots from Current Affairs. She has a staff of about 80, including presenters, outside contractors, producers, editors and directors.
Crowe says there are strong feelings across the board that the revamp of Current Affairs programmes is long overdue, but budgetary constraints make it difficult.
Although keen to use a variety of in-house and independently produced footage, Crowe says that the organisation is cash-strapped. Also, the buying of footage from BBC or CNN costs thousands of rands and, for a public broadcaster, this money is not readily available, she says.
She does not believe in armchair journalism and talking heads: “Presenters are at the coalface of the story and have to perform well, but sitting in the studio is not going to do the trick. Atmosphere can only be added to a story if you are out in the field and you are living the story,” she says. Very passionate about television, Crowe goes off on a tangent about what makes good riveting television. “Presence, atmosphere. Living the moment there and then with the presenter. A touch of human interest – all this and more is good television.”
She is under no illusion that the mandate of catering for 11 indigenous languages is going to be easy. She admits there is a limited pool of black producers who are able to produce documentaries or even inserts in more than two Nguni languages, making the objective of catering for a wide spectrum of South Africans more difficult. “Yes, it’s difficult but it’s definitely worth striving for,” she says.
Crowe says the Current Affairs slots will sometimes follow the news, while at other times they will challenge news and set the pace. “We hope that through some of our current affairs programmes we will be ahead of the news, sometimes even provoking news via controversial debates,” she says, gesturing nonstop.
She pays attention to detail. Religiously watching her shows every evening, she gives feedback to staffers the next morning. She even feels that the backdrop to the Focus studio needs to change. “It needs to be simpler, straightforward. The colours are not right.”
Her mind operates at a racy pace and she jumps from interior designing to her mother who was an actress and had “a bit part opposite John Wayne”.
“Competition in the broadcasting arena is not far off and we have to get ourselves in gear,” she says.
Staffers say she will make a difference because she has the expertise and readily shares her skills and knowledge with up-and- coming journalists.
With several training projects in place, she is putting her money where her mouth is and is busy training the country’s future producers. Hopefully her spark will not be dampened by the in-house politics which are so rife at the SABC.