Andrew Worsdale
Grey Hofmeyr is a great guy, and honestly, I’m not sucking up (I had a cameo part in Suburban Bliss). Straight and to the point with an affable and very South African manner about him, he sits behind a large desk in Henley Studios at Auckland Park, with a monitor beside him. He is busy as the creator and producer of SABC3’s new daily soap Isidingo: The Need, a multi- faceted portrait of the local mining industry as many mines face closure and recession is digging in.
“The gold mines are a microcosm of our society. There is a class system but it’s divided along financial not race lines,” says Gray. Using a pool of screenwriters headed by Neil McCarthy and Mitzi Booysen, the series is also directed by a variety of directors – Hofmeyr himself, McCarthy, Kurt Egelhof, Jann Turner and Hilary Blecher, a stalwart of the Market Theatre’s early days who has recently returned from New York.
The series could be dubbed The Villagers II and even features Clive Scott as Ted Dixon (the dumbo of the original series), now the mine-house’s barman and Gordon Mulholland as Hilton McCrae, ex-boss and now a special consultant steeped in old-school ways as the mine and its community go through the new South Africa transformation.
Hofmeyr was 25 when he was directing John Cundill’s scripts for The Villagers in 1974. He’s now 49 and one of the things he’s keen to do on the new series is develop new talent. While I chat to him he takes a peek at the monitor, takes down notes and phones the studios downstairs with some suggestions. “I’m a great believer in training,” he says. “After all, the advertising industry does it all the time, so why shouldn’t people in TV? When I started I was really young and I think people should be given the same breaks” He stops for an instant, phones down to the control room and says about a certain actor, “I think he can come in quicker with his line.”
Hofmeyr is a consummate professional, now known more as a writer/producer/creator than a director. In fact it has been three years since he directed a movie, Leon Schuster’s There’s a Zulu on My Stoep. “I really want to see this project succeed,” he tells me. “My job is basically to create a massively successful daily episode-driven drama. And that’s what it is. There’s far more real drama than in a soap. I mean yesterday we shot a faction fight. Classic soaps are relationship- driven but with Isidingo we’re not pulling any punches. It is strongly written and the stories motor along, so if the audience misses one episode it might miss a plot point”.
They have shot 20 episodes out of 184 and are busy writing for January. This amazes director Hilary Blecher, who directed One Life to Live for ABC in the USA. “We only used to work two weeks ahead,” she says, “in case American public opinion changed.”
Isidingo, next to Generations, is the biggest commission for local drama ever made by the SABC. And, judging from the preview episodes I’ve seen, Isidingo seems more sophisticated than Generations or Egoli, which it’s primed to compete with. The lighting is not high-contrast and glitzy. “We tried to go closer to the techniques used on film,” says Hofmeyr.
He’s remarkably relaxed about this big venture, “If I had to be more hands-on I’d have to be two people.” And as for the difference between this series and the 1970s cult hit The Villagers he says, “The Villagers was more folksy, very comfortable. And at that time we weren’t allowed to show black people, which we did, and ended up breaking new ground. The only similarity is that both are set within the microcosm of a mining society.”
Director Blecher is full of praise for Hofmeyr. “Grey is a great initiator and he’s very flexible. He allows a lot of things to creep in and so I think the series, although very ambitious, is intelligent and well-written. It’s not a heavy handed reflection of society.”
Blecher created Poppie Nongena on the stage and then went off to the United States where she won plaudits for her production of Frida Kahlo, a new opera, that was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Judging by the little I’ve seen of Isidingo it’s superior to the usual soap dross – there’s not much heavy moaning and long stares, although that kak sometimes comes in. The high-calibre actors elevate this production beyond dross.
Isidingo starts on Tuesday July 7 and is on SABC3 Tuesday to Friday from 6.30 to 7.00pm