While the rand/ dollar exchange rate has been strengthening everywhere else, in the arts it has dropped so dramatically that R3-million will buy you only 50 Cent (the rapper, that is). Some typically whingeing artists have complained that the amount allegedly paid to the star is nearly half of Jo’burg’s Arts Alive budget. Clearly, they don’t understand that this is what the market wants.
On the other hand, the market doesn’t want Alan Swerdlow and his stand-out programme, Art of the Matter, presented by Fiona Ramsay, or Michelle Constant’s Art on the Edge at SAfm.”The programmes that have been cancelled are not helping us attract a representative audience,” bemoaned the SABC spokesperson. So there we have it. Swerdlow got the chop because he didn’t bus in township listeners to his programme.
When I first saw the headline ”SAfm cans whites” in last week’s Mail & Guardian, telling the story of the axing of white male presenters and producers, I had a brief vision of being able to walk into a shop and ordering a ”bottle of red and a can of whites”. Was the news and information leader now diversifying into konfyt?
The question is, what will the two-hour, guillotined arts programme be replaced by? Yet more talk radio? I’m all for democratising access to the airwaves, but I’m not sure if I can handle any more of Mohamed of Lenasia bleating on about taxi drivers relieving themselves on his newly painted vibracrete wall. Or Thabisa of Thembisa complaining about her historically disadvantaged fingernails still being refused service in Sandton. Or Diane of Fourways, Suzette of Bloemfontein and Frik from Bellville proclaiming Hestrie Cloete’s family’s right to free speech.
Surely public radio should also be a leader, rather than simply respond to the lowest common denominator? Surely it must educate, not only inform? Surely it is more than a couch for the nation to indulge in collective therapy? Just about every theatre, gallery and festival (not to mention rugby or soccer game) is struggling to realise a ”representative aud-ience”, the ”representative content” notwithstanding. There is general acceptance that this will take visionary strategies, much resources and some time. Yet Art of the Matter has been axed for not achieving what few other cultural enterprises have.
And the public broadcaster, whose job it should be to invest in helping to develop such audiences, chooses rather to dumb down and deliver an ”amorphous market” to its advertising and political masters. But this is what happens when philistines act as though they are the chosen people.
Art of the Matter has played host to some wonderful radio moments. There was the South African ambassador to Japan, formerly known as the minister of arts, culture, science and technology, who suggested that the arts community go to hell. Which is where most of them were, anyway. Thanks to him.
Then there was the new chairperson of the National Arts Council who preferred to interview himself and, in an act worthy of Zimbabwean democracy, refused to engage in a debate with other panellists and demanded that the presenter apologise to him for expecting to debate with others.
Surely the public broadcaster didn’t think the programme was unrepresentative because only black high-ups seemed to make fools of themselves on it? Surely they hadn’t forgotten that for 40 years or more, white conceits in power had done the same?
The public broadcasting market doesn’t want Swerdlow. But the Market (that is, the theatre) wants Swerdlow — to serve on its board. Here’s hoping that he can help develop a representative audience there. Come to think of it, any audience would do.
There is little point in trying to change the minds of the SABC. The philistine giants have decided. But for being a little David trying to keep the arts alive on public radio, for giving space to the passions of artists and for persevering to get to the Art of the Matter against many odds, Swerds, take a bow.