Max du Preez has never been in therapy, but he’s on the box again with a new current affairs programme. Alex Dodd reports
`I’ve never seriously considered therapy,” says Max du Preez, who has spent his last two years making damn sure that the public got to see exactly what went on at the truth commission hearings. “Some of my colleagues would say it shows,” he comments jokingly, before acknowledging that the change of pace and scenery would be “very healing”.
But, when Du Preez talks about a change of pace, he doesn’t mean “going back to the farm or becoming a PR”. No downshifting here. A changed pace, for this particular media lion, comes in the form of a high impact, half-hour investigative current affairs programme, Special Assignment, which recently took up its weekly Tuesday night slot on SABC3.
Du Preez’s reputation as a brave and gutsy journalistic conquistador has preceeded him since he captained that defiant Afrikaans weekly, Die Vrye Weekblad, across the stormy seas of the late Eighties. I’ve heard about his clashes with Anton Harber, then editor of the Mail & Guardian; about his unique camraderie with his staff; his profoundly mercurial moods and his large capacity for laughter.
His television career was launched with Q&A, but it was Special Report that imprinted his name in the national psyche: more death squads, corruption, massacres and torture you’d be hard pressed to bear witness to. One of my first tentative questions, therefore, is about therapy.
Du Preez instantly grants access to his inner logic. His openness, perhaps to some degree a by-product of the mass catharsis he has personally witnessed, exposes the workings of his inherently journalistic mind. “No,” he says, “and I’m not sure how much of me is the macho journalist saying: `This is what we do. Therapy is for sissies.’ Du Preez sees truth commission journalists bemoaning their own suffering as extremely bad style. “It’s not very respectful towards the people involved in this process,” he says. “It’s a privilege to record this experience …”
As the truth commission lumbered towards its final outpouring, Du Preez began to reach a stage where he felt it was time to stop digging and dwelling in the past. “Dealing with the past takes a heavy toll on one. There needs to be a point where you say: `Okay, now we’ve dealt with the past. Let’s deal with the present and the future,'” he says.
So, a while back, he and two old friends – dirty tricks investigator Jacques Paauw and Annelise Burgess, who worked with him on Special Report – were sitting and hashing these things out over a few drinks. And it was in asking themselves that crucial question: “where to from here?” that the seeds of Special Assignment began to take root.
“We believed that there was enough goodness and courage at the new SABC to … ward off state intervention – to back us when stories are risky … I would be deeply disappointed if the new SABC were to go the way of the old SABC and buckle to ANC pressure.
“My experience so far is that there’s no one in the ANC who would, like PW Botha, phone the studio and say: `Take that man off and put this on’ … But there is the danger in South Africa of knowing what the government and the ruling class wants and saying: `I’m going to do it this way round because otherwise that could displease them’. I think that is normal in a society shortly after a change of government like ours, but as journalists we should be in the front line fighting that.”
To this end, Du Preez has got together a team of some of the hottest journalistic talent in the country. Their aim is not to “expose petty corruption in the Jo’burg council every week”. “We knew Richmond was going to blow up,” says Du Preez, “so we had somebody there in time and we broadcast it on the night that they killed nine people. Some of the people who appeared in our programme were killed. Angola is happening now and we’ve had someone there.”
But not all the inserts on Special Assignment will be overtly political. The team also plans to tackle some medical stories, some cultural and human behaviour angles and to look at trends in advertising in a fresh way … “There’s so many urban legends around – propaganda, lies … and fears. Somebody needs to, without fear, break through it. We decided on the name Special Assignment because that would be broad enough for us to say: `We can follow whatever story we believe in’ – the only criteria being: it should go deeper, it should be newer, people should sit up, people should afterwards say: `I know a little bit more’.”
I’ve heard some pretty hefty criticism of the show (See Down the Tube PAGE 11) from a variety of media types. Some feel the Sudan piece was too long. Perhaps it’s a case of being raised on too much American TV fare and finding anything more intensive than a quick insert between washing powder ads overly earnest and lengthy. Sad. As I see it, Special Assignment is the closest this country has come to England’s Channel 4-style documentaries. If there were bets on how good it’s going to get, I’d put my money down.