It’s been a long drag from the early days of South African television. We got the goggle-box about 20 years later than other developed colonies mainly because of the firm resistance mounted by a long-standing minister of posts and telegraphs in the National Party government, Dr Albert Hertzog. For all his dismay about the evils that what he called the ”little bioscope” would bring with it, Hertzog was anything but a crabby old tweezer-lips in other pursuits. When it came to motoring, he owned a Porsche and used to drive it like a bat out of hell. Helen Suzman once told me he was also a perfect gentleman, of impeccable manners.
But enough of Albert. He might have delayed television’s introduction but we didn’t waste too much time catching up. We now have it for a tad more than the two or three hours (in alternate official languages) of the first daily broadcasts of the 1970s. Some say there’s now far too much television to choose from which, of course, is true in the case of those who can afford the satellite offerings of DStv.
In the face of the far superior business acumen of its DStv competitors, the SABC has fallen way behind in what it offers to its public. Notwithstanding its responsibilities as a public broadcaster, and the fact that its ratio of local productions to imported ones far outweighs M-Net’s, the SABC simply doesn’t rate. Its array of mainly American sitcoms and cop-cum-military series are strictly bargain basement. Programmes such as Ripley’s Believe It or Not or The Invisible Man are the dingy pabulum of American daytime television. Late-evening slots offering fake spiritualists and time-worn movies are so unappealing it isn’t surprising so many have migrated to satellite.
The SABC doesn’t even get to suck the hind tit when it comes to international sport. The SABC no longer visits Wimbledon or any other major tennis tournaments. The most its viewers get is little snatches in news bulletins — ”pictures by courtesy of Supersport”. The same applies to rugby and cricket. If you want to watch the Springboks or Proteas, buy a decoder. Otherwise no United States Open or Masters, no Ernie Els or Retief Goosen, even no Currie Cup. Worst of all for a soccer-mad proletariat is the complete lack on SABC television of any but local matches.
Then there’s e.tv. A free-to-air broadcaster relying principally on its advertising income. The station has news bulletins that, unlike the SABC’s, seem free of direct government control but where the editorial preference is for items about sky-diving accidents, three-headed babies or Eskimo circumcision rituals. When it comes to low-grade programming, e.tv outstrips its competitors by several laps. The intellectual and cultural high- point of e.tv programming is the wrestling. Now and then the programmers make a mistake and run series such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under but for the rest the material has been plundered from wherever they send old trailer-park reject shows to decompose. The station does relay the occasional international soccer match, and it also makes ”local” — some good, much wretched. That material, along with movies that have long since been shown on DStv and the SABC, make up most of the diet.
And so to the vast assemblage, the ”bouquets” of DStv. You can get it all at DStv, from soft porn to superb BBC drama, from China Central television to the eternal repeats of Discovery and National Geographic. Cookery programmes, travel, wall-to-wall movies, most of which are decidedly B-grade and which they repeat until the magnetism falls off the tape. News bulletins from the BBC, Sky, CNN. Sport to come out of your ears.
Where DStv needs an almighty kick up its fundamentals is in its presentation. For all its variety — and there’s a whole brimming basket of that — the product gets thrown at the viewers with a level of technological crudity that defies belief. DStv customers pay a lot for the service and they get movies that come up with no sound, balls-ups nobody at the DStv end seem to notice — until some enraged viewer phones up and tells them. Age warnings stay up throughout movies because the presentation staff couldn’t be bothered to take them off. It’s a case of take it or leave it. Ad breaks go on too long and viewers get returned to their news or documentaries two or three minutes after they’ve restarted. The sound levels are at wild variance as you change from channel to channel. Try getting out of a Supersport channel and you’ll end up throwing your remote at the decoder — they don’t like you to leave Supersport. And the curse of ”interactive” television is upon us. Why we can’t be left to watch programmes without being pestered by sponsor competition-touting is beyond reason.
As I say, there’s plenty of it. The trouble is that mass is just mass without specific gravity. And there’s very little of that. As Groucho once said: ”Too much is enough.”