LOCAL production company Penguin Films is going through the roof – what with its sit- com series Going Up beating Soul City to the top of the TV ratings with a combined adult and youth audience of 3,5-million, and a new character-based drama series Gaabo Motho, scripted by renowned author, anti-apartheid activist and medical doctor Gomolemo Mokae starting this coming Monday on SABC 2.
Penguin, headed by Joe Mafela of Sgudi Snaysi fame, director/producer Roberta Durrant and cameraman Uwe Jansch has enjoyed considerable success since 1991 when it won three Star Tonight Awards and four Artes. In 1994 and 1995 it won awards for the drama series Velaphi and for Dennis Davis’s riveting current affairs debate, Future Imperfect. This year, along with Gaabo Motho, it has produced Future Foundations – an educational series on housing; the controversial women’s magazine programme Back Chat with Thembi Tambo and Philippa Sklaar and Constitutional Talk and Bambanani Empilweni, an investigative series based around the National Health Insurance Scheme.
In many ways it could be viewed as an RDP (reconstruction and Development Programme) TV producer, with even the comedy and drama series reflecting, and at times, lampooning, present day South African society – warts and all.
Roberta Durrant says: “To an extent that’s true. All our actuality, educational and magazine programmes operate in that arena. But it’s interesting and challenging work. We are always driven by the concept, and with Future Imperfect there was certainly a need for that type of debate in the public eye.”
Durrant, who worked as a production assistant at the SABC way back in 1973 and soon after began acting in and directing theatre, got into producing “for one thing only. No one would give me a job. I wanted to direct, and realised I’d better produce so I could let myself direct.”
Their latest effort Gaabo Motho, which she co-executive produced with Mafela, is a 13- part half- hour series about the de- Americanisation of Tshenolo Junior, the son of a South African exile who died in America. Although they auditioned many American actors for the role, they felt none had the requisite television experience and the role went to local good-looker Fezile Mpela.
Episode one begins in Soweto, in June 1976, where Tshenolo Senior’s mother Mmabatho is shot in the back during a demonstration. Eighteen years later his African-American son returns to “the homeland”.
At times I found the episodes I viewed schematic, self-conscious and stagey. Filmed with a single-camera in real locations, it doesn’t have the zip of Going Up. Yet despite some stiffness and didacticism, Gomolemo Mokae’s wry writing style and keen feel for character make the series more than just an issue-based piece about African identity.
In episode three the American is led to believe that he has to undergo a circumcision ceremony to become a man. He protests: “You wanna tell me they don’t use Novocain?” His cousin Phemelo taunts him: “A man must suffer in silence.” The scene resolves itself with an Afrikaans slang-word for circumcision “Piep Snyman!”
The extensive use of jokes, irony and a real sense of present-day township life lifts the series above the mundane. Durrant says: “A sense of morality does come out quite strongly in the series. But it’s very gentle. All of Gomolemo’s writing is based on character foibles with a strong South African backdrop.” The writer himself agrees: “Anybody who thinks that the series is a boring lecture on what it means to be African is mistaken.” The project began when Mokae submitted the concept and four completed episodes to the SABC, after which he approached Penguin Films to produce it. The script was then workshopped for a number of weeks before production began.
Going Up, in contrast, was pitched to the SABC in 1989. “They couldn’t find a slot for it,” Durrant says. “It cut across all their boxes and divisions as a first time multi- lingual programme. They were very cautious, even flummoxed, especially with what the advertisers might think.”
It became CCV’s property and was later developed by both TV1 and TV2 and by last week it was the top-ranking show in the country. It’s not hard to see why. Using many of the techniques of international situation comedies, including clearly defined and slightly wacky characters (not the over-the- top caricatures of say Suburban Bliss), it is possibly the best local comedy yet broadcast.
The notion of a translator/tea boy working at a small legal firm with a shebeen on the top of the building was Joe Mafela’s idea, and he is superb in the lead role of Jabulani.
What makes the series so unique is that it tackles the issues of the day without hammering one over the head with them. What’s more, the rainbowness of the cast is never over-played – all the characters remain unique and sympathetic. Future plans for the Production Company include a feature-film of the most watched TV show Sgudi Snaysi, and several more educational and magazine proposals.
Gaabo Motho plays on Mondays on SABC2 at 7pm. Going Up plays on Wednesdays on SABC1 at 8pm