Janet Smith
Nine days of the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts will be turned on by television for the first time this year with the rah-rah arrival of Cue-TV on small screens throughout Grahamstown and surrounding areas.
A late autumn lunch is a moment for Christo Doherty, senior lecturer in television at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, to take a breath before bolting colour into the blue screens with a temporary community TV licence from the Independent Broadcasting Authority.
He’s birthing Cue-TV with the able assistance of student midwives from Rhodes’s First Television School – but who would guess at the labour? Doherty’s conversation, heard against the pre- festival rattle and hum, is as smooth and tantalising as a trip on a cocktail jet.
He says labour has been eased slightly by the success of the Cue-TV pilot, which happened over two days during last year’s festival and involved Doherty, talented young Johannesburg producer Llewelyn Roderick and 12 third-year students majoring in television.
Material recorded on videotape was played on screens at two festival booking venues at the Village Green and the Monument, and a positive response from festival organisers, performers and the public attracted fancied attention to the project.
“It was ambient TV,” Doherty says, “situated somewhere between airport lounge TV and game shows with lots of ongoing sequences, visuals cut to original music and short magazine-type pieces.”
This year, continued funding from Standard Bank and the Reuters Foundation and matching grant funding from Business Arts South Africa has allowed Doherty to plan nine television days, from Friday July 3 to Saturday July 11, with a larger team of 35 students and outside specialists, including Roderick as studio director and Tim Chevallier as field camera director.
The transmission will be handled by Sentach who will link the journalism department TV facilities with a broadcast mast on the monumennt via microwave. A 50w transmitter will ensure the town is saturated by the Cue-TV signal.
Some of the funding will be used to run an educational tune-in campaign over the three weeks prior to broadcast, mostly to explain to potential viewers the difference between the UHF signal which will relay Cue-TV and the VHF signal which relays SABC broadcasts.
There could have been a great opportunity for e-tv, the new free-to-air commercial channel, to assist the developmental Cue- TV project, as their own signal will be relayed on UHF.
The experience might have offered South Africa’s new private TV station an opportunity to test a marketing campaign similar to the one on which it will have to embark soon.
Neither the SABC nor M-Net appear to have shown interest in supporting Cue-TV either, which is disappointing, as the project seems like a ravishing chance to get in touch with and invest in television-makers of the future.
Meanwhile, Doherty is convinced Cue-TV will give festinos what they want: information, interviews, previews and reviews covering the main and fringe festivals through arts magazines, bulletin boards, live studio interviews and more. “We particularly want to follow the unexpected and we’ll have a news crew out in the field to give us regular news flashes.”
Cue-TV has a strong training and development component and could make a genuine contribution to cultural tourism in the Eastern Cape. As Roderick says, Cue-TV has “a captive audience which needs to be kept informed and entertained. The festival has never had a hard sell,” he adds, “and we really felt that festival TV could draw them in and offer a real service which would try to articulate the significance of the festival.
“Hopefully it’s about creating a radical space, a very interesting space that will compel people to continually refer to their TV sets.”
Roderick’s plans for the afternoon magazine show sound fabulous.Essentially it’s about establishing a space that will play with the visual language of the Eastern Cape.
Performers with footage they would like to submit for use on Cue TV are invited to contact cindy@journ. ru.ac.za. For further information and dialogue, contact [email protected].