In the hotseat at Midi TV
Swapna Prabhakaran
At first glance, Jonathan Proctor does not look much like the television executive he is. He wears no tie and has an open, immediately likeable face.
He looks controlled and calm – he could be an aeroplane pilot or a professional golfer just off the green.
Look closer though, and the tension of the past few weeks shows. It’s visible in the corners of his tired eyes and the disarray of his short hair.
Proctor is the managing director of Midi Television. The past weeks must have been fraught with nerves, the wait leading up to the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s decision to grant Midi the new national television broadcast licence.
The announcement relieved a lot of anxiety for Proctor and his colleagues, but his real job begins now: putting into practice the detailed plans outlined in Midi’s bid submission.
Proctor is very modest about his role at Midi. His job, he says, “is not to be creative, but to make an environment in which creative people can work”.
Smiling gently, he says: “Creative people, journalists and engineers, are difficult people, difficult to put together.”
But work together they must, if Midi’s hopes that the new station, e.tv, will air from October 1 are to be realised.
Proctor began his career as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town (UCT)and the University of Bophuthatswana (Unibo), teaching skills in the management of artistic and technical environments.
His introduction to the heady world of broadcasting came some time later. “I don’t remember the year, but I was asked to help by Unibo. I was asked to fix [Bophuthatswana’s] broadcasting.”
Once he began looking into the broadcaster’s problems, he was hooked. “It gets into your blood, you can’t look away,” he says.
Proctor then became the director general of BopTV and, for six years, developed the station’s brand with enthusiasm, establishing various services including MusicTV and Edutel.
“We started distributing these through Africa,” he remembers. “We were the first to get rid of that ugly test pattern. Remember when there was nothing to watch on TV except the test pattern? We replaced it with CNN. Now everyone has copied that idea.”
He is proud of his achievements over that time both in news and in drama.
“We were the first to interview [Deputy President] Thabo Mbeki, while everyone else was still in prison. We ran stories and footage of [President Nelson] Mandela as a real person, not some still photograph, like the SABC made him out to be.”
On BopTV, programming included showing “black people in roles that weren’t servile”. The Bophuthatswana broadcaster also started making “huge strides” in distance learning, Proctor says.
But all that was cut short when then Bophuthatswana president Lucas Mangope “put me under house arrest”.
Why? He shakes his head. “It’s not something I want to talk about. I said it all before the truth commission and I don’t want to go over it.”
From there, he and various other former BopTV staffers formed Rettcorp International, which was hired by Midi as consultants for the technical component of their bid submission.
“Midi then offered some of us jobs,” he says. That’s how he ended up in the hotseat he occupies today, making a “nice environment” for some talented creative minds to pull together and make good television.
He firmly believes “television is a medium that deals with intelligent audiences, who can come to their own conclusions”.
“They don’t need to be read to. Parents read stories to children, television and pictures tell stories.”
Despite his energy and commitment, Proctor is quite sure that he won’t do a long-term stint with Midi.
He says he’s just there to get it up and running, and to train his successor. “I don’t know yet who it will be, but Midi will set up a permanent black CEO, and my position will be handed over.”
What will he do then? Proctor wants to head back into academia. He says earnestly: “I will go back to UCT and do my PhD.”