Thebe Mabanga
in your ear
I recently spent two weeks listening to radio in the Western Cape. The experience has proven to be mildly refreshing without being mind blowing. It was refreshing by offering an alternative from the Johannesburg scene without necessarily leaving me gasping for more.
Due to time constraints (and the people I worked and hung around with) I confined my attention to in descending order of appreciation Good Hope FM (GHFM), Kfm, P4 Radio, Cape Talk 567 MW and, very unfortunately, Metro fm (more on that later). We should remain eternally grateful to Good Hope for providing us with the stunning Zuraida “Zee” Jardine, who has matured a lot (vocally and otherwise) since her days as a newsreader on GHFM before being snatched by 5fm.
GHFM has an impressive, young energy about it. A presenter who caught my ear was their drive-time jock, Irma G she is surely next on 5Fm’s list. The problem with GHFM is that it gravitates towards 5fm with its sound. One of Good Hope’s best DJs, breakfast jock Nigel Pearce, sounds so much like 5fm’s Mark Gillman I was surprised to discover he is actually coloured.
Kfm caught my eye with a butt-kicking ad. It features a coloured boy sitting on a snazzy, miniature convertible. The ad declares that if you think he is rich, you should meet his parents. On the dial they are like Jo’burg’s Highveld Stereo: A decent mix of retro sound and a lot of crossover material.
P4 radio has a good adult contemporary sound, but I found it much weaker than Kaya Fm. A commendable feature of their efforts is the amount of local music they play, as pointed out by their Top 30.
A disturbing feature of Cape Town radio is that African audiences are catered for as an afterthought. If you are black and upwardly mobile, you have to flip between stations or resort to Metro Fm. For me, this felt like going to Cape Town and eating hake. The fact that Metro has no competition here is the reason it has been making gains in African audiences in recent audience measurement surveys.