off air
Ferial Haffajee
Just as viewers were starting to get used to presenter S’bu Khumalo doing his cool and chatty thing on Sunday nights, the long-awaited television arts programme, aRt, has been taken off air.
aRt played out for the last time on Sunday night and will be replaced in October by a new programme called Flux – an investigative arts series produced by Penguin Films.
After 10 episodes, that too will be replaced by yet another programme – and South Africans will be subjected to at least two further short series before they can settle into a longer-running home-brewed arts programme.
The change is part of the SABC’s effort to spread the work and improve its commissioning procedures. But it’s not a development which has been roundly welcomed because the stop-start nature means that resources are wasted.
“It doesn’t make very good business or creative sense,” says Etienne de Villiers, an aRt producer. They believed that if they stuck to the programme brief and if initial reviews were good, aRt would get an extension. “We felt we were just getting up and going,” says De Villiers, who added that they had started making business deals and contacts in the arts industry. Good programmes come from being connected and connections are only made once your product is well known.
His fellow producer, Peter Bode, adds: “We’re a little high and dry. A little disappointed.” SABC3’s commissioning editor, Ansie Kamfer, originally won industry kudos for the original way in which she took tenders for the arts programme. She says aRt’s limited run is exactly the way things have been planned in order to give at least three of the five finalist producers a run with their own arts show. “Seeing as there’s so little work available, more people should get an opportunity,” she says.
This scheme will also allow her to assess producers’ work. “A proposal [on paper] is one thing. But you can only really see it implemented on screen.” Kamfer says she is not worried that arts programming might lose viewers while the programme keeps changing. “The type of people who watch arts and culture like suprises and innovation. Besides it’s not something that will continue forever.”