You often hear the expression, “He wasn’t very good at fiddling – he got caught.”
That hardly ever happens today; fiddlers end up on the roof playing away as they salute that happy fiddler hunting ground in the sky.
The going’s good, and the going’s going to stay good – for as long as there are more urgent things to do than spending time and money catching out people who are nowadays dismissed as “inventive”.
But this inventiveness is very damaging. Policing petty abuses is the job of the professional producers’ organisations. Let’s look at two of them.
The big “make up is cheaper than plastic surgery” fiddle.
The SABC has its own way of implementing “broad-based economic empowerment”, which is meant to go beyond mere legal requirements. It uses it to further the part of the charter that says the SABC has “to nurture South African talent and train people in production skills and carry out research and development for the benefit of audiences”.
The SABC wants to commission product from producers who have a broad base of equitable management as well as staff. So there are declarations that you have to make, and show documentary evidence that there is a reasonable spread of person of colour, gender and ability (or disability).
Declaration and evidence? Neither of which will be checked? If the producers were to do “plastic surgery” and actually train these people as directors and downwards, it would cost money.
These people are scarce and to train them up is costly (time and money). So you have one of two choices: lie about them altogether, or put on a lot of make up and employ them as cosmetic wallpaper.
Even if you employ them, you still have to lie. Can you see the producer introducing these people when the commissioning editor comes to visit: “This is Ismael, he’s our own token blind Muslim cameraman, and this is Thandi, our own token female black director – Thandi bring the car round to the front.”
The even bigger “trainee and mentoring” fiddle.
The easy way to gain your industry development points is to say that you will employ two or three young trainees who will be developed on the job.
I mean – how naïve can you get! Just because you employ someone to help a crew member, does that mean that the trainee will learn anything? Possibly learn a lot of bad habits dating from those halcyon days of the 1980s.
Also, people will do anything to work in show business. Even work for nothing. Even pay just to be able to hang around the set. So even though the budget says the producer will pay R250 a day, he doesn’t actually have to “pay” him. The poor bugger is so show struck, he will sign anything every week, and that’s R250 a day in someone else’s pocket. That’s nearly two lines a day of really good stuff.
Also, even if he does get R250 a day, that’s still good value for someone to run errands, stand in for extras, and make toasted sandwiches.
But no one checks the training, no one checks the progress, and no one traces the actual development.
The SABC is overloaded. Its bureaucracy is stretched already, chasing phantom corrupt commissioning editors, how can it be expected to police the affairs of nearly 100 private companies? And if they did employ auditors to do it, that’s millions of rands, leaving the production costs to pay for people with as much integrity as lawyers.
So the SABC must trust the producers. They can only do this through the producers’ professional organisations. That’s what professional organisations are there for – to self-regulate and impose ethical behaviour on members.
Do you trust a producer? I don’t. Trust me, I’ve been one.
Howard Thomas is a media business consultant, trainer and specialist in audience psychology.