Thebe Mabanga
Three television shows on air reflect the level of sophistication of the country’s young at heart and the diverse, intelligent way in which they consume popular culture. Around 9pm on weekdays is definitely a time for young adults when Bassiq (Wednesdays), The Phat Joe Show (Thursdays) and Castle Loud (Fridays) bring a lively mix of music and talk.
Bassiq is enjoying a rerun of three months, offering yet another opportunity to sample its intelligent presenting and groundbreaking features. The chemistry of its presenters has been a huge contributing factor to the show’s success. Bianca Miles, Azania Mosaka and Shane Manilal interpret and improvise an intelligent script remarkably well. The script is reminiscent of the Toyota Top 20 in the early Nineties. Every now and then, though, things get inexplicably convoluted when they try too hard. DJ Bionic on the decks brings in the crucial dimension of a club DJ.
Innovative features on the show include the video mixes, which fuse local and international sounds on the decks and on screen. There is also the Top Ten off the Wall, focusing on many themes, from the best black rock acts to the worst boy bands a compact and informative way to explore aspects of popular culture.
A brave experiment by the creators is to present the show in different settings every week. The sets have been made to look like anything from a CD shop to a sex parlour.
The show has managed to average 976 000 adult viewers with a peak at 1, 2-million adult viewers in its opening week. Does this mean people tuned in and were not terribly excited? If it does, then they went on to miss out. Now they have a chance to make up lost ground. The reception that Bassiq has enjoyed has been partly due to an experiment undertaken a few years ago, Sprite Rush Hour. This was an early gig that introduced, among others, Phat Joe.
Since those days, Phat Joe has grown to be a phenomenon and, some would note, an ego. Not only did he move his radio platform from regional to national by leaving Yfm and joining Metro FM, he also moved his television platform from free-to-air e.tv to SABC1, a move that was preceded by him using the cheesy Simunye presenters as the butt of his jokes.
Deafening hype, mounted on a mega budget, ushered in the Phat Joe TV show. An underused scoop on the show is the country’s best club DJ, Ready D, being limited to signal ad breaks and spicing up applause with his scratching. Perhaps the studio audience gets more out of him. The movie-review segment has been much improved, still with Andy “The Admiral” Kasrils. The skits, featuring comedians Kagiso Lediga and David Kau, invariably oscillate between the witty and irreverent and the sickeningly banal. A commendable decision was to make kwaito acts perform with live bands.
The most glaring rough edge, though, seems to be Phat Joe’s interviewing technique. In a bid to make the conversation seem informal, the “phat”-lipped one would feign spontaneity. What it actually is is an under-researched subject matter without any surprising or deep and penetrating questions. Since the start of the year production seems markedly improved and tighter. Following its debut last November, the show has attracted a million adult viewers a week, again with a peak at 1,3-million for the first episode and on average 1,1-million adults every week. SABC1’s plans to make the show daily were nothing more than irritating hot air. There just is not enough material.
One of Phat Joe’s many pranks at e.tv was to go to the set of Castle Loud and demand the job of Bongo Maffin member and TV presenter Stoan Seate. The producers did not oblige and Seate has kept his job to become the luckiest man on TV. As a Bongo Maffin band member Seate gets to work with Thandiswa Mazwai, the dreadlocked Xhosa woman with whom he reportedly fathered a child. On Castle Loud he teams with another gracious number the sussed and amiable Unathi Nkayi.
A limitation of the concept is in its name. Castle is not the most popular of brands among young adults. It is the beer they drank when they started dabbling with alcohol, but they have moved on to other South African Breweries brands like Hansa Pilsener, and, for those of us with a higher income, Belgian brews like Stella Atoir. The show is an attempt to reposition the brand, judging from the new print ad campaign.
The best value-adding feature of shows such as Castle Loud and Bassiq is their success in playing crossover music, from white rappers like Bubba Sparxx to U2’s Beautiful Day. Just last week, they played Nickelback’s You Remind Me. The show has also cracked the magic figure of an average of one million adult viewers with a peak of 1,2-million viewers at, you guessed it, the start of the show.
Virginia Hollis, joint managing director of the Media Shop, reckons that although music is important, the audience wants someone who is contentious and who wants to know what artists think. This is why she would choose, purely because of format, Phat Joe above the two music shows.