Stakeholders pass the buck and the blame for local content malaise, writes Glynis O’Hara
Local contempt for local content. This accusation sparked quite a debate at last week’s Durban pow-wow on the state of local content on our airwaves.
All parties – from Cabinet ministers, the SABC, M-Net, performers, technicians, community radio to record companies and producers’ organisations – agreed on the contempt bit. But they all blame each other for the decline in local productions on television, while concurring that radio fares better at airing local talent.
A new SABC TV advertisement claimed to have “put the public back into broadcasting”, said Robbie Thorpe, of the South African Guild of Editors, a grouping of video editors. “Unless they’re talking about the American public, they’ve failed dismally.” M-Net’s local content, he added, was “pathetic”.
But at the end delegates from other countries as well as local broadcasting honchos felt the conference, organised by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology had been positive and offered a way forward for the embattled TV industry, not least the idea of an industry-wide forum to engage government.
The plan for a forum dovetailed with the closing appeal of the Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting, Jay Naidoo, for “concrete proposals” and a “a coherent strategy” to be put forward to the government.
Mfundi Vundla, chair of the Independent Producers’ Association, said he thought the forum would definitely go ahead. The association was in fact already talking to the government, M-Net and SABC about local content and a larger forum would improve its muscle.
“I think we’re getting somewhere,” he said after the conference, “and we’re going to get it right. It was also good that nobody was actually against local content.”
That’s not entirely true, though, as owners of private stations frequently cite “market forces” as dictating a taste for the foreign. However, Rupert Murdoch’s V music video network, which serves the Near East, South East Asia and the Far East, has been more successful than MTV Asia precisely because it is local content based, speakers noted.
Mark Newman, of the producers’ association, entitled his impassioned paper Local Contempt while Naidoo in turn blamed the industry for not telling truly South African stories.
But Naidoo’s heated closing address (he did not attend the conference) indicated, many delegates felt, that he had misread the people attending. “There were a lot of community film-makers, TV workers and community radio people there,” said one delegate, “and yet he behaved as if all of us were living in an ivory tower.”
Naidoo asked why the story of people like Phineas Sibiya “one of the most outstanding unionists in the country”, who died a grisly death during the BTR Sarmcol strike, had not been told on film or video. He went on to say that funding should not just be provided for “poor photocopies of Hollywood” but for work that truly reflected local realities.
“We want to be located in Africa, not in Europe or America … I want to see a revolution in this sector, a real contribution to the African Renaissance.”
But, in fact, the story of that strike had been told through the story of another victim, a colleague of Sibiya’s, in a documentary called Simon Ngubane Is Dead, said Newman later. Originally made by Melanie Chait – now SABC general manager of programmes, policy, planning and co- production – while she was in England, it was reworked when she came back here and broadcast on SABC.
The kind of work Naidoo was talking about was precisely what people in the audience wanted to do and were having trouble doing because of SABC policies, said another delegate. The problems boil down to money.
Cost is a huge factor in keeping the airwaves American. Buying a sitcom from the United States is much, much cheaper, sometimes 400 times cheaper, than making your own, because America pays for the costs through its huge domestic market before even looking at exporting the show, said Michael Ward, policy adviser to the Australian Film Commission. South Africa, he added, has four-million TV sets compared to 100-million in the US.
But there was help offered when Carol Steinberg, chief director of policy, projects and evaluation said the arts department was busy establishing the South African Film and Video Foundation. It would both provide seed funding for projects as well as operate as a training fund. They were also busy with the Cultural Industries Growth Strategy, which would produce an economic study and analysis of cultural industries and policy recommendations.
She also suggested a public television fund under the foundation to help finance local TV programming, in which government, the SABC and the private sector could be equal investors. Newman added that many production houses operated at very low or no profits at all. And contrary to popular myth, South African TV programme production costs were much, much lower than the US, United Kingdom and Australia, he said.
A one-hour documentary in the UK cost R900 000.
In South Africa, it cost R182 000. A one hour drama cost R4,5-million in the US, while in South Africa it would cost R450 000.
In fact the costs were “too low to be viable on any level: to neither sustain a programme production industry, to produce quality films and television, nor to compete effectively on the international market,” said Newman.