I watched the first episode of the new SABC3 weekly newspaper drama, Hard Copy, with more than a modicum of interest. I’d heard there’d been some squabbling between the SABC and e.tv, each one claiming it first thought up the idea of a programme set in a local newspaper. SABC claims Hard Copy as the first, e.tv says its show, Scandal, broke the ice. In fact, SABC television wins hands down, because about 18 years ago it commissioned and broadcast a pilot television programme called Final Edition. This puts the SABC ahead on the originality of the idea.
Which puts me ahead of the SABC, because it was little old me who first proposed the idea to SABC TV’s television drama department. I was then commissioned to write a pilot episode. Final Edition was produced and broadcast, with the late Richard Heyns in the lead role Tony Hackbourne, editor of a mythical South African morning newspaper. The pilot was considered for a series but turned down by the SABC for being ‘too sophisticated”.
And ahead of me in the inspirational stakes was that epitome of conscience-pendulate white-newspaper editors, Tony Heard. During the ‘struggle” years Tony used to sit in his office in St George’s Street in Cape Town singing antiphonal protest-duets with the likes of Donald Woods and Andrew Drysdale. Horribly out of tune, but dreadfully sincere. Under Tony’s stewardship, the Cape Times was the vexatious bane of the apartheid government’s existence. Or so Tony put about. I openly admit the editor in Final Edition was based on the Heard model.
I got to know Tony yonks ago, when we were both at the Treverton Boarding School for Bright Young Future Leaders, in Mooi River. Even then I had wanted to immortalise Heard in some way. His relaxed relationships with his fellow pupils, his saucy verbal fencing with the teachers, his uncanny skill as a marbles impressario all added up. Tony was an expert on any subject. As a fellow-pupil, green with envy of his capable and forever generous mind, I marked Tony down as a formidable prospect for a fulfilling manhood.
In fact there was only one prowess in which Tony needed coaching and advice. At 11, essentially an urban innocent, he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to indulge in a popular pastime among adolescent boys. Still, metaphorically speaking, some say he’s more than made up for this lack in his professional life.
But back to Hard Copy. It’s a bit rough on the show to judge it by its first episode, but some things can be said at this early stage. One could be, ‘Well done, you fearless creative persons. Your bold forensic paddle into the murky but cruelly realistic world of investigative journalism shows some real potential.” Another could be just plain, ‘Oops”.
Even after 10 years of rapturous democracy, even in these producers’ minds, even in today’s SABC, is it really considered cool to expect your viewers to endure occasions in a local drama that sound a bit like extracts from President Thabo Mbeki’s weekly ANC Today letter?
An example: Newly Appointed No-Nonsense 27-year-old Black Editor of politically dauntless but financially lurching weekly independent newspaper, to 56-year-old Steely-Eyed May-Safely-Be-Boiled-in-the-Packet, White Female News Editor: ‘Is this really what your hostility’s about, or is it the fact that you can’t take working under a young black man who got the job you wanted, and still believe you deserve.”
No one talks like that any more. That’s the kind of dialogue they used Upstairs at the Market Theatre in the mid-1970s. And where did the Hard Copy writers exhume the wince-making: ‘The ink of this newspaper runs in my veins”? Fiona Ramsay should have a danger clause added her contract so that she cannot be forced to utter banalities like that.
Only here and there in the Hard Copy script were there similarities with the way people actually speak to each other. The thing didn’t have dialogue, it had rows of verbal dumplings, lines that stick to the back of your teeth when you try and say them. And shoe-horning in the occasional zesty ‘fuck” to show how switched on the whole thing is, just doesn’t do the job.
The actors tried hard, far too hard in the case of the lead, James Ncgobo, as the editor, Joe Dlamini. He came across so utterly unpleasant he’d be considered too nakedly ferocious as a feral hood in The Sopranos. If any real editor spoke to his staff like that they’d have him darted and taken away in a cage.
Hard Copy needs some urgent work. Acoustic wallpaper of incessant telephones, vague office noises, no more makes a busy newspaper office than a recording of a turtle dove makes a forest. The show needs more real mess, both human and material. Its characters are predictable, its script a series of slogans, its plot more a cosy parable than much else. This newsroom was like a TV dinner: full of solemn political and social vitamins but without much taste.