The best show at the National Arts Festival this year will be on TV. Alex Dodd spoke to Christo Doherty, the force behind Cue- TV
Most people over 25 who decide to relocate to Grahamstown are in downshifting mode. The idea is to settle down and enjoy a few more good novels. Not so for Christo Doherty, senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and the unstoppable force behind Cue-TV.
Several years of fresh air and long lunch hours don’t seem to have calmed him down one little bit. On the contrary, if his latest achievements are anything to go by, it’s less a case of bridge parties at the club, than “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin”.
Brought to life in 1997, Cue-TV started as a cute little fringe endeavour: Two hour- long programmes played off tape at the National Arts Festival’s booking venues. This year, with a MultiChoice-sponsored satellite channel, satellite linkups by Telkom and a Webcast developed in partnership with Rapid Blue Interactive, Cue-TV will be taking the festival to viewers across not only the country, but the entire continent.
“We’ve moved from the margins to being the best show of the festival – which is the festival itself,” says Doherty with characteristic surety. But isn’t anyone worried that audiences will be so busy watching the festival on easily palatable soundbites on TV, they’ll forget to queue for tickets to the theatre? “But we never show an entire show,” is his lightning- quick response, laughing off my confession about my growing addiction to reality in slick summary form.
For 15 hours a day, the festival will be broadcast live from Cue-TV’s studio and outside broadcast units in Grahamstown. And if the quality of last year’s broadcasts are anything to go by, the SABC should be seriously worried. Either that or invest in a bumper load of Red Bulls.
Not only is the festival channel sexy and stylish, with graphic links between programmes to make you feel like you’re living on the hippest continent on the planet (as opposed to some sad neon and day-glo backwater – Simunye: We are done), the student interviewers are ace.
Last year I crawled down to the studio far too early one morning to have a little chat about a Brazillian actress I’d seen burning up the floorboards the night before. Expecting to stumble on to a badly lit cardboard cut out set, you can imagine my dismay on walking into a scene from Broadcast News. Even the coffee was good. The interviewer was so sussed and confident, I started feeling like Mr Bean on Oprah.
Quite frankly, I should have known better. Doherty’s never been one to mess around. Flashback to Journ II at Rhodes. The entire class has turned into a flock of tropical parrots, comfortably inured to lectures that can be chirped back to the source in point form. Enter Doherty, who takes to the lectern like some messianic force summonsed by Foucault, like Neo summonsed by Morpheus in The Matrix. It’s time to catch a wake up. Those who don’t get the plot, get burned. This dude is not scared of rating you way below 50% and God help you if you don’t know the meaning of “hegemony”.
There was always this much-discussed ambiguity about the man. Something slightly unnerving about the way someone so articulate and convincing could slice through the propaganda tactics of Big Brother, His Masters Voice, the Broederbond, the SABC … Beyond that power dynamic lay another – a future hegemony that would be less obvious, more filamentous in its control. Now that future is the present and it’s no longer the government that has the final nod – not without the sanction of the corporates, the information and entertainment powerhouses. And indeed Doherty has intelligently situated himself on the margins of this more sophisticated and intricate broadcasting web.
But enough about the uberplan. Back to the Matrix … This year over 70 students from the Department of Journalism and Media Studies and PE Technikon will once again work at every level of the production, from studio assistants to field directors. Leading industry professionals will be providing mentorship and training to ensure high production values and innovative programming.
Possibly one of the more magnetic aspects of the channel is its allure as a kind of laboratory facility for industry professionals – a happily symbiotic “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” creative arrangement. The channel gets the hippest talents in the land at low rates and the media people get a chance to experiment in a way that is often impossible within the strictures of the commercial channels.
Delapse, one of the hottest digital imaging houses around, have really stuck their boots in, doing the imaging for the whole channel as well as for the individual programmes. We can expect the channel to have, in Doherty’s words, an “audacious, futuristic, ironic” look, while the style of the individual programmes will vary a great deal from “an off-the-wall Flintstones feel to primitivist charcoal and wood block graphics, depending on which designer has done the job”.
What’s more, Delapse have come up with a virtual character called Flamingo Boy who’s apparently “camp as hell”, donning outrageous pink outfits. Along with his boyfriend, Leather Boy, he’s bound to be “quite a presence at the festival”.
Other known presences will be physical comedian Bevan Cullinan, who’ll be taking on “everything from Shakespeare to bad hypnotists” in the Sundowner Show broadcast live from the Monument, and radio motor- mouth Mark Gilman.
Gilman will be hosting the breakfast show in the second week of the festival, directed by M-Net whizzkid Gavin Wratten, who’s “dying to go hands on with something experimental and fresh”.
Primedia and the Film Resource Unit have also come to the party with the New African Film Festival, featuring the most challenging African short films since the death of the Weekly Mail Film Festival. You’ll also get a chance to view some of M- Net’s New Directions films on Cue-TV.
Between the shows they’ll be broadcasting (mainly South African) music videos. “We want to make the whole town go mad for kwaito which will hopefully influence the street culture,” says Doherty.
Also on the groove front, there’s the Sound Scene Sponge Show. Expect music to be broadcast live on to the streets from festival music venues by Cue-TV’s outside broadcast unit controlled by Henriette de Villiers, currently assistant producer for Front Row.
But the party not to be missed will be Monumental. Produced by Glenn van Loggerenberg, who is also the channel producer, this outlandish multi-media shindig will be happening (for many, many hours) on the first Saturday of the festival, featuring VJs and DJs from across the nation.
All in all it’s hard to believe that Cue-TV is costing “a mere half a million excluding the value of the technical sponsorships. If you include the value of the satellite channel that takes it to around two million,” says Doherty.
The ridiculous (and, I might add, diabolical and outrageous) thing is that despite the fact that the ad team has made around 115 presentations, the people with the money are still not really biting ad- wise. And, on this point, Doherty is characteristically pointed: “Of course,” he says, “If it was cricket we’d be rolling.”
The broadcast can be seen on DStv’s Events Channel (No 97) and as a Webcast at