Channel vision
As any year draws to a close it is usual for columns, such as this one, to be devoted to retrospection. What was the best and worst television of the past year?
Fortunately such solemn assessments will not be my responsibility this year.
This is because my various deep moles in the halls of television have been able to supply me with some as yet highly classified information about the year 2000’s programme schedules. What follows is a Mail & Guardian exclusive.
Naturally it is the SABC which promises the most thrilling in the way of local content. One of their most innovative new shows will be hitting the air waves in early February. It’s a live audience studio production thing called Spot The Speech Defect.
In this programme, short clips of well- loved SABC newsreaders and reporters are played and two studio teams of linguistics experts, specialist physicians, grammarians and speech therapists compete in trying to identify what is clinically wrong with these verbalisations. Points are then awarded to those SABC news-readers and reporters who are deemed by the teams to be the most orally unintelligible. The lucky winners receive automatic SABC promotion or get headhunted by e.tv news.
Another new production will be the pioneering new talk show to be hosted by our beloved state president, called Thabo’s Sanctuary. Produced in collaboration with the Government Communication and Information System, this show will feature live interviews with current refugees from international justice, the emphasis being on ex- dictators and army chiefs with well- established records in mass genocide or student slaughter. Folks a lot like members of recent government favour-visas – Tiananmen Square mastermind Ling Po and Ethiopian benefactor Mengistu Haile Mariam. Deploying his new sophisticated global personality, Mbeki will try to reveal that there’s always a lighter side to goon squads, motorcades and ethnic cleansing. The show will also send a strong humanist message saying that just because some political brute has personally overseen a bloodbath or three doesn’t mean to say that he didn’t support the ANC in the darkest days of the struggle against apartheid. It begins early June. Guests for the first season of Thabo’s Sanctuary will be Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosevic and Robert Mugabe.
The government’s road safety initiative gets a welcome boost in March with a new M-Net show, Things To Do in Laingsburg When You’re Dead. Hosted by urbane anchor-guru Dullah Omar, this programme will bubble over with suggestions and driver tips, the amazing ideas fertilised recently in Omar’s mind. And he won’t be confining himself to terrestrial modes of transport. He intends using the programme to introduce his new policy for reducing aircraft accidents by means of speed limits: 100kph for light aircraft and 80kph for airliners.
The SABC’s English drama department promises no major changes in its product. With its production budget slimmed down by some 80%, the best it can offer this year will be a 17-hour dramatisation of Ronnie Kasrils’s autobiography Armed and Dangerous, renamed Meenah Lo Makhulu Freedom Fighter, so as to give it a more revolutionary flavour. Script is by Andr Petrus Brink and direction by Justice The Honourable Albie Sachs.
Otherwise the new programme schedules show little real change. The SABC have to show willing in response to public outrage and so it’s believed Max du Preez will be abandoning his new career as an Afrikaans intellectual interior decorator and will be coming back to television as author/presenter of a set of audacious personal documentaries. The first of his new series will take a close look at what makes Denis Beckett tick, in a programme entitled He Has Nothing to Lose But His Chins.
I hope the above advance information installs in you an urgent need to renew your television licence at your nearest post office. South African television should always remind you of General De Gaulle’s immortal line about Brazil: “It’s got great potential, and always will have.”