South African soaps are being Africanised and upgraded to win international markets, reports Paul Martin in Cannes In a bid to make their South African products more saleable worldwide, the producers and distributors of the long- running Egoli and a new soap series, Blue Diamond, are deliberately bolstering and upgrading their African characters.
The series’s international distributors, United States-based Media Ventures, are also planning to have Egoli restructured into short, 260-episode self-contained stories, along the lines of the Latin American novellas – another effort to promote world sales.
They believe, in the selling-ice-to-Eskimos vein, that Egoli and Blue Diamond could then penetrate even the Latin American market.
Media Ventures has encouraged Egoli’s South African makers, Franz Marx Films, to make these changes as a result of its uphill struggle to secure non-African sales.
The soap has made striking inroads into Africa; Ghana launches Egoli this month. In Tanzania it top-rates during its peak 7pm slot in competition with three other private television stations. In Kenya it
can be seen only in and around Nairobi, while in Uganda, where it launched on May 26, it runs twice a night, at 6.30pm and 9.30pm – so that whichever half of the country is enduring its alternate power black out doesn’t miss an episode.
Much of this African expansion is the brainchild of a former Zimbabwean who took up American network news reporting. James Makawa’s African Barter Company soon gave up the idea of dubbing the Afrikaans into English for the African market, and now each episode is shot with an all-English script over and above the South African bilingual version.
Makawa is convinced that selling a soap in the West is a superb means of overcoming foreign misconceptions about South Africa. “It’s a way for people to get a positive image about Africa, not just disasters,” he notes. “And we don’t need Hollywood to come over and use us as a backdrop for their movies. Here, we can do it ourselves.”
Breaking out of Africa, however, is proving tough. Yet the Media Ventures men are determined to persevere.
“When we first offered a South African soap here at the Mipcom TV market in Cannes a year ago, people laughed at the idea. No one’s laughing now,” declared the company’s Richard Hammer.
Part of the new respect for the product stems from its “high quality of production”, he says, and part from the perception that a foreign African soap has potential to attract a viewing market.
“The feedback we’ve been getting from potential customers is that they want to be more African,” according to the veteran German marketer Franz Elmendorff.
He has been pressing not only for more black faces, with more significant black roles, but also to have settings which portray the African environment. “Instead of a hotel, which looks the same worldwide, why not set major events in an African game-lodge?” he urged. He wanted to see much more of the African bush.
“Putting Africa into it gives a soap more saleability,” he expanded. “How about putting a bit of Daktari (a Sixties wildlife series) into Egoli?”
Landing contracts in the German market (to which end a German character has been inserted, marrying Kimberly Edwards) is regarded by soap-marketers as the “toughest sell”. That’s largely because, apart from America’s Bold and Beautiful, home-grown products dominate this cash-rich product- driven market.
The distributors’ latest promotional efforts included bringing Egoli star Chantel Stander to Europe, first to mark Egoli’s being chosen as Africa’s representative at the world’s first permanent soap exhibition, in a Rotterdam museum.
Then she washed up at the glamorous French Cte ‘Azur for the Mipcom film and television market in Cannes late last month. Here she attracted the photographic attentions of a leading French national daily newspaper, and her presence secured a front-page story about Egoli in the TV market’s religiously read daily magazine.
Inside the Palm Village pavilion, paved by handprints of the annual film festival’s megastars, the marketeers were plying their wares by schmoozing potential customers. “We’ve had plenty of interest, but no new sales … yet,” informed Hammer.
Already, under the influence of his international sales team, Egoli has introduced Winston, a successful black American executive, and has made Donna, once just a secretary at the Walco Motor Corporation, engage in a steamy love affair … till his wife arrives.
Then, too, they have just introduced a younger black female, Gina. It is quite possible, though no one is saying, that she will romance with Tsheko, another black character, who wants to be a rock star and writes music.
“Only Franz Marx knows if they’ll fall in love, and he’s not telling me,” chuckles Hammer. More African characters are being devised.
In Blue Diamond, the Africanisation of soap will be more prominent. Filmed in San Francisco and Cape Town, with an international cast and scriptwriting team, it traces the web of intrigue and skulduggery that develops when Anne relocates from ‘Frisco to the Cape and takes over her aunt’s wine-farm.
Will Egoli and Blue Diamond marketers lure the foreign TV stations into their embrace, or will they be sabotaged by their evil rivals? All will be revealed … episodically.