Not Quite Friday Night is back on our TV screens with a change of name.ANDREW WORSDALE talks to the director
ON entering the room I notice an ashtray crammed with stompies and half-sucked cough sweets; a soundtrack features some eccentric interviewee and I catch the end of a sentence, ” … the heat then starts melting your scrotum”.
Where else but the editing room of the local series The Not Quite Friday Night Show (re- named, after “much deliberation”, since it now flights late on Fridays instead of on Thursdays).
Director Chris du Plessis is not unlike the programme itself: extremely likeable, shabbily handsome and full of self- deprecating humour – kind of like an Afrikaans Donald Duck on a steady diet of booze and Chesterfield. The only concession to his health is that he’s switched to Chesterfield Lights.
In the past Du Plessis worked as a print journalist, having been one of the founder members of Vrye Weekblad on which he worked as arts editor in addition to toiling on defunct entertainment mags City Late and Vula. He moved to television, doing inserts for M-Net’s Prime Time about the likes of alternative rock star Koos Kombuis and enigmatic actor Dawid Minaar. Then he worked as a researcher for CBS doing the Mandela release and a piece with veteran reporter Bob Simon on the Afrikaner right wing.
He recalls shooting the latter, wicked trademark smile curling his lips. “We went to this bar and got completely pissed with these ous, and the Americans loved it … they said everything was a sound bite.” His eyes flicker with humorous disbelief as he remembers one hefty regular who literally threw a small black child across the bar, smashing bottles and glasses. “He turned to me and said, `See, we’re friends now!'”
The Not Quite Friday Night Show, now in its third series, possesses much of Du Plessis’s tongue-in-cheek take on the rainbow nation. It began in the late Eighties as a series of proposals workshopped by himself and some actors, including Joanna Weinberg, Irene Stephanou, Neil McCarthy and Russell Savadier. The idea was to do something along the lines of Saturday Night Live, a mix of humour and contemporary music. But Ronnie Wilson, then in charge of entertainment at the SABC, ripped off the idea and came up with Punchline, a late-night comedy-musical variety show set in a cocktail bar with smoochy cover versions and the tired old comedy gang from Biltong and Potroast. “And that’s originally why no one understood this thing we were trying to do,” Du Plessis elaborates, “because the South African concept is that if it’s not glitzy, if it doesn’t have `famous’ people, then the viewers can’t possibly be interested.”
With the inclusion of Johan Coetzee of Skintone Productions and the introduction of an affirmative-action type agenda at the former NNTV through commissioning editor Pat Kelley, the original Not Quite Friday Night proposal found itself among 12 pitches by independent production companies that were selected for broadcast two-and-a-half years ago. “It was a crazy idea, a concoction of documentary inserts, music and comedy. All the others were very serious – you know, talking to victims of apartheid and so on.” And so they got a five-week slot and the first series was born. “It was a funny combination, they didn’t really have a slot for comedy; comedy still meant sitcoms at the SABC and what’s more it was a kind of mixture with magazine-type elements with profiles on township music stars of the Fifties … it was a helluva thing to make coherent, but it sort of worked.”
They discovered that if they had people who were weird-and-wonderful or funny-peculiar if not funny ha-ha, then the motley mix would work in the show’s cut-up format. Du Plessis recalls the first shoot, “We really didn’t know what was going on technically … we had an outside broadcasting facility, a jimmy- jib, four cameras … you know, the whole number.” Top vision-mixer Ted Lawrence assisted with the shoot but it seems his professional expertise got in the way of the show’s crusty concept. “I had a couple of problems because my campaign was if it’s going to be vrot it’s got to actually look vrot … It’s not easy, if you know what you’re doing, to make something look shit, I mean those guys are used to delivering good work.”
The cameras were out of phase for the first three episodes of last year’s series and Du Plessis liked the effect, “I liked the fact that it looked kak … I want more lights to fall over. If the continuity doesn’t work then all the better.” As for the show’s shebeen setting, it appears that the audience and crew all get very tanked up on the show’s own brand-name Kotz Lager. On the shoot of the first series, the researcher forgot to organise the boozy regulars, so Du Plessis marched across the street from the studio and commandeered some ice-cream sellers, “It was a classic situation … I just said `Come, come we’ve got lots of beers here, we give you money, you drink beers and sit here.'” Three years on, shebeen regulars Sunday and Lucey are still there.
And that’s the grungy charm of the show – everyone including the audience should kick back, have a drink and be entertained … kind of like visiting the neighbour’s backyard.
It seems that the mixed format has proved successful as Du Plessis remarks, “After the last few programmes we decided if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” The show has been a ground-breaker in promoting local music and a sense of off-the-wall indigenous humour. “We’re trying to give exposure to the brilliant, brilliant local groups that somehow don’t get given a platform and also just to rip off this American shit we see every fucking day … the show is the antithesis of that. That’s why we have celebrities like Johnny Clegg sweeping the floor in the background.”
The first episode of the new series is a tad more sophisticated: presenter Sechaba Morojele in a new striped zoot suit has settled into his laid-back style, expertly mugging and doing double-takes to the camera; guest celebrity Debbie, South Africa’s champion stripper, is endearingly shy and her routine done in Ninja gear to the strains of Enter the Dragon and Carmina Burana, is hysterically, though unintentionally, funny.
In addition, bulky boxer Mike Schutte puts in a tackily comic appearance miming a song from his new CD entitled Ek het die Hillbrow Blues.
Unfortunately, though, this appears to be the last of the series. Du Plessis has had enough of dealing with tight budgets and fighting diehard conservative attitudes within the corporation. His executive producer at SABC3 Ansie Kamffer has been incredibly supportive but, “It’s a constant struggle to be accepted … they see this, like, `Yeoville-energy’ which they don’t like, but they know they can’t ignore it … ”
Du Plessis sighs with frustration, but he keeps on churning out his kind of stuff. Just last week, his band Die Radiators released their first CD entitled Volume O.
Tracks include the legendary Somerslied with the refrain Fokkit maar dis warm in Johannesburg, a song called Sy’s Afrikaans (Maar Sy Wil Net Engels Praat) and an ode to Eugene de Kock and his cohorts called Spaai. For the moment you can enjoy the funny- peculiar-ha-ha world of the album and the TV series and if there are no more projects in the pipeline then at least the relaxed, anarchic sense of humour developed by Du Plessis and his cohorts will always prevail. Even if only in Yeoville.
The Not Quite Friday Night Show can be seen on SABC 3 at 11.30pm this Friday and thereafter at 11pm on Fridays until the end of the year