the cultural year
The best and the worst of the continuity presenters
PLENTY happened in SABC television this year. We had a relaunch with an unwieldy Jumbo jet and some awkward, second-grade, politically-correct United States TV actors. Felicia Mabuza Suttle looked pleased with herself. Stevie Wonder was asked to comment on the quality of South African television. It goes without saying that the man was at a loss for words. And of course, there was the birth of satellite, a language transformation and the changing of the channel footprints.
Some things, however, did not happen. One of these things is that the corporation did not decide to get rid of its continuity presenters. Are continuity presenters a waste of time and money? Do we need to be told which programme is coming up if most of the major newspapers carry television schedules? Love them or hate them, they are there anyway.
A team of Mail and Guardian reporters, in an attempt to provide a valuable service to readers, decided to ask members of the public, some Mail & Guardian readers and some experts who the most popular and the most reviled continuity presenters on the public broadcaster are. These are the results:
Most popular continuity presenters:
Jerry Williams SABC3
According to the people whose opinions we canvassed, she’s the queen of cool with nicely clipped vowels and proper enunciation. Since she made her entry into television, presenting the larnie-farty Art Works, she has grown into a true Dorianne Berry, albeit a deeply tanned one. These days her dreadlocks have become less “dread”-ful and more coiffed. She, in our survey, was the most loved of the talking TV schedules.
Vuyo Mbuli SABC3
The former school teacher is becoming a true broadcaster. He talks at a modest pace, giving viewers the time to dash to the kitchen between programmes. In sport terms he is also fast becoming another Dumile Mateza, sans the African-American-Xhosa accent.
Connie Masilo Matsunyane SABC2
With an acting career of sorts in her back pocket, the former beauty queen is tops with the public. Although some viewers think she can’t act her way out of a teacup, they also think that she could handle telling them not to miss a show they had already planned not to miss.
Robyn Poole SABC3
The bulk of the readership of this newspaper seems to find this channel the most watchable, so most of their choices come from SABC3. “She reads her script very well. You could swear she’s talking without the aid of an autocue,” was one response. We were not quite sure whether that was an honest compliment or one with a subtle sting.
Sandy Ngema SABC 3
She is a consummate professional and performs her task very well. A lot of white folks are crazy about Sandy. When the SAfm debacle was hitting the fan, many white English speakers said that the station should used Sandy as an announcer instead of those other flat-vowelled darkies. Flat-vowelled darkies say things like “bed” instead of “bird”, and “vowelence” for “violence”. Our Sandy doesn’t say things like that.
Least popular continuity presenters:
Camilla “le Zoeloe Blanc” Walker SABC1
According to black viewers, this woman is one of the most irritating things ever to hit our screens, especially when she tries to out-Zulu the other Zulu continuity announcers. “I cringe whenever she opens her mouth, praying that she will speak English because the flat vowels of the Zulu language become somewhat sharp in that lovely blue-eyed mouth,” one respondent said. “It wouldn’t be so bad if she was comfortable with the fact that she is not Zulu and will not be able to speak the language as a native speaker. She believes the myth that beneath that shock of blond hair beats the heart of a Zulu maiden.”
Dicksy Nqula SABC1
He’s the presenter with the phony dreadlocks crawling down his forehead. The verdict: “Lose the hair — it looks terrible”.
Lucas Sithole SABC1
The time has come for that promotion into public relations or owning your own production company. You’ve earned it. You no longer need to go through all that pain of pretending to be excited by the inanities you have to utter. The viewers know it. You know it, and the Force above knows it as well.
Tracy Cundill SABC3
We received a rather unkind E-mail missive, lionising Ms Cundill: “With that ubiquitous frog in her throat, a consistent knack for mispronunciation and a swarthy look that is mid-way between gothic and upmarket shopping mall, Ms Cundill appears at times to be the perfectly constituted drag queen — elegant, sexy and with an alluring mix of the butch and femme. But she’s no drag king, unfortunately, it just comes across that way.” As this contribution is unkind to drag queens, we will not comment any further.
Ian Logan SABC3
He’s so slick, so wet, that one viewer suggested he has the perfect face for radio and the best voice for print journalism. It’s a pity newspapers don’t have a version of continuity presenting on their pages.
The Special Zoot Suit Award:
To Sechaba Morojele, the perpetually unfazed and charming not-quite-presenter of the Not Quite Friday Night Show is our unanimous favourite of the programme hosts on the public broadcaster. One fan describes him as “an enormous relief on an uptight TV.”
The Worst Television Promos Anywhere in the World Ever Award:
One of our biggest gripes at the new look of the public broadcaster’s channels is its promotional material.
Runner up for the award is SABC3, who flagrantly copied BBC World’s format.
Their adverts promoting “new” programmes with a banner indicating the month propped up by a low-key music score have at least been modified since the relaunch. But they still smack of block letters and look more like that advert for your uncle’s furniture business than anything else.
But altogether more disturbing and a worthy recipient of this award is some of SABC1’s promotion material, including the ludicrous, campy music video number with badly styled, terribly choreographed continuity presenters hoofing it up to the Village People’s fabulously fluffy disco hit In the Navy.
Whoever came up with the idea needs to be firmly dispatched to the corporation’s canteen and not let back into the marketing department until they had eaten all the icky chicken livers on the lunch menu.
Perhaps most annoying of all, however, is the endless repetition of each channel’s main theme, every-time I hear “Simunye: We are One” or “Come Alive with Us, come share your life with us and come alive!” We want to switch the telly off, sickened by the repetition of tacky music and boring lyrics that come across as ingratiatingly self-congratulatory.
To be fair, however, SABC2’s new channel logo is pretty cool, rather like a smooth after-shave ad.
THEATRE
The Protest Theatre Award:
This year saw the only play in the history of South African theatre to receive multiple front page headlines in the press. Mbongeni Ngema’s R17-million Aids play Sarafina II walks away hands down with this award as well as almost a third of the year’s department of health Aids budget. What we want to know is we a play, Titus Andronicus, with himself in the lead role. When no-one came to watch it, he attacked local audiences and theatre managements for their intellectual sloth before fleeing back to Britain to write a book about staging Shakespeare in Africa.en no-one came to watch it, he attacked local audiences and theatre managements for their intellectual sloth before fleeing back to Britain to write a book about staging Shakespeare in Africa.
The Please Call Again Award
To Janet Suzman, who also came to town, produced a play — The Good Person of Sharkville — and bitched local theatre standards, but decided to do something about it. The South African-born actor/director recently returned from Britain to audition young actors for roles in two productions that will be playing abroad.
DESIGN
The In Your Eye Design Award
A hotly contested category. Second runner-up: The Civic Theatre in Johannesburg’s banned poster for Indiscretions, which featured a boy about to bite a female breast. First runners-up: Mother Productions’ poster featuring Mother Theresa in Ray Bans for the Mother Returns rave and Durban’s i-Jusi for the Gotcha Buthelezi surf gear design.
But the unanimous winner was Johannesburg artist Steven Cohen’s banner on the annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade.The artist has subsequently been attacked by the gay community for the banner, which forms part of his ironic The Queer as Monster series.
FINE ART
The Snatch ‘n’ butt Award:
Wits Fine Arts student and winner of the 1996 Martienssen Prize, Kaolin Thompson, whose clay vagina-shaped ashtray catapulted her into instant art notoriety without the artist ever having to produce another work again. It — or rather our critic’s (racially-specific) interpretation of it — earned the wrath of deputy speaker of the National Assembly after a picture of the winning work, accompanying the review, was published in the Mail & Guardian.
Kgositsile denounced the artwork as an insult to black women, the review as racist, the Mail & Guardian as irresponsible and advocated a tightening of censorship laws. The great fanny debate hit the rest of the media, became a subject for discussion at Wits university’s annual Body Politic conference and other forums.
The PC Stomp on History Award:
To Pippa Skotnes, for displaying bits of Khoisan history on the floor of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in a literal effort to erase historical misrepresentations of subjugated communites. The Griqua National Conference of South Africa said that Skotnes was, in fact, furthering their oppression.
books
The 1996 Not-Quite-the-Nobel-Prize Literary Awards
Most Eyebrow-Raising Literary Scandal: Mark Behr’s revelation that he had been a police spy during his university years. He also caused a frisson when, earlier in the year, he accepted the M-Net Book Prize for his novel The Smell of Apples by saying he was glad to have won the award as he hadn’t slept with any of the judges … “yet”. It is worth noting that, as far as the M&G can determine, he still hasn’t slept with any of the judges.
Most Pointless Marketing Exercise: The CNA Literary Award, which, despite attempts at long-needed adjustments to its categories, failed to regain any of the glamour it has been haemorrhaging for years.
Smoothest Hijacking of Someone Else’s Launch: Peter Godwin speaking at the launch of Jo-Ann Richards’s The Innocence of Roast Chicken.
Most Self-Referential Launch: Launch at Caf’ Ganesh in Observatory, Cape Town, of Ashraf Jamal’s novel Love Themes for the Wilderness, which describes the launch of Caf’ Ganesh in Observatory, Cape Town.
Most Contentious Literary Review: Stephen Watson’s review, in these pages, of poetry anthology The Heart in Exile, which elicited reams of angry correspondence. Most letters were longer than the original review.
Most Egregious Literary Attack: Ina van Zyl in Die Burger inveighing jeremiacally against Afrikaans writers who, she says, go way beyond the bounds of moral decency. A 1987 story of the late Koos Prinsloo’s, she claims, “gruesomely violates the privacy of former state president PW Botha” by repeating a commonplace insult.
Most Courageous Pissing-in-the-Wind Literary Letter to the Press: Chris van Wyk denouncing The Star for not reviewing the work of various South African writers. Among those neglected was his novel The Year of the Tapeworm.
SOCIAL
The Henrietta House Award:
To television presenter Vinolia Mashego for stealing the limelight at the 1996 Kora All Africa music awards in Johannesburg. As the legendary songstress Miriam Makeba tried to give an acceptance speech for her lifetime achievement award, Mashego jumped up twice, live on national television, to deliver her praise poems, thereby stealing 40 seconds of the one-minute Mama Afrika had to speak.