Dreaming of what the SABC could be

September 24th, 2009

In between the old SABC and the new one, I twice had a taste of what a national public broadcaster can do.

I and my colleagues were among the first “outsiders” to approach the SABC in the post-1990 period to push them to take on a different kind of current affairs programme. We had refused to work for the SABC before then, and some of our friends told us we were being premature when we went to to them.

But we saw an open window and we were the type of people who would climb straight in. We knew the old regime wanted to show it could change, and to work with those it would not previously work with.

We sold them the idea of Ordinary People, a current affairs show that would look at an event through the eyes of three different people who would intersect through the story, each with a camera crew following them. It was all about South Africans grappling with the change in their lives and it was intensely humanist. For example, we looked at the Kempton Park negotiations through the eyes of a young woman administrator, a rightwinger protesting against it and a man involved in a protest for rural land rights outside the centre. It happened to be the day that the AWB drove a vehicle through the front door, and we captured it live – and through the eyes of participants. It was powerful, and dramatic, and incredibly moving.

We would shoot each story in one day, edit it in two and have it on air in the same week. It was bold television, by any standards.

There was a farmer who, hit by the tough recession of the time, was being foreclosed and everything he owned was being auctioned off. We tracked him, the auctioneer who went from farm to farm doing this, and one of the labourers, who was likely to suffer even more than the farmer.

At the end of the day, with the sun setting in the background, the farmer, watching his tractors and his tractors and cattle being driven off to other farms, said: Dit is hoe die tyd is. Die tand van die tyd, hy byt hard, hy byt seer, hy byt kwaai.”

It gave us the title of the piece: Die tand van die tyd. It was truly television for that time, capturing how so many South Africanswere gritting their teeth though uncertain times.

The next day the team was filming in Sebokeng which was going through terrible violence and drive-by shootings. The three characters were the leader of a self-defence unit (SDU), a policeman, and a woman and her children trying to survive in a vulnerable area.

The SDU head, a former MK soldier, newly returned, said to one of the crew: “I saw last night’s programme. Poor farmer man.”

As producer and director (and also my wife) Harriet Gavshon put it: “My heart swelled. It can work, I thought. Television can be this thing; this unifying and humanising force which allows one person into another’s world and allows them to share a common humanity.

“It doesn’t matter that that they would have absolutely divergent views and there was a vast gulf between them. But somewhere, somehow, television can and does make a true and deep connection between people from different worlds.”

***

The second incident was when I found myself face to face with Adriaan Vlok, then the Minister of something called Law and Order. At the Weekly Mail, we had written that he had authorised secretive payments to the Inkatha Freedom Party, the story that became known as Inkatha-gate.

The SABC invited me to speak about it on air as our paper went to press. Vlok’s henchmen intervened, and the SABC honchos threw me off air.

When a newspaper carried the story, showing that a Minister could still interfere in news programming, they immediately invited me back. This time the ball was in my court and I set down some very tough conditions: although pre-recorded, it could not be edited; I could ask the Minister questions directly; it would be in my choice of language …

We said to ourselves that we would be reasonable and concede on most of these conditions, as long as they gave us one or two. But the SABC guys, eager to prove how independent they could be, accepted them all without any hesitation.

I did one more thing. I could not show Vlok that we only had a few measly sheets of paper as evidence. We had said we would publish more and we knew there was a lot more – but our hard evidence was skimpy. So I took the newspaper’s entire legal file for the year, a massive wadge of paper, which I banged down on the table as I arrived. The Minister went pale at the thought that we might have so many of his internal documents.

I questioned Vlok aggressively for 17 minutes, well over the 12-minute schedule, because I knew they could not edit it and I had him on the run. I grilled him like a Minister had never been grilled in public before (and has not since, I might add), waving in the air bits of paper which I said were evidence that he was lying, but in fact were old court records.

He was fired a few days later.

***

I tell these stories because this is a time to remind ourselves what a great public broadcaster can bring to a country which wants to pull itself together, to develop a common identity and forge different relationships between and among its people.

It should be the medium that has people talking together, watching and telling the same stories, laughing at the same jokes. A reality of our recent SABC television is that – for entirely commercial reasons – it has put us in silos, with different people watching different. Many millions of people watch Generations, but all of them are black. There are very few programmes that bring together audiences across class, language and race barriers, creating the common narratives that are needed to make us see ourselves as one people thrown together in the southern tip of Africa.

When we read newspapers, we generally are reading about people like ourselves. Wealthy people don’t read the Daily Sun, where they would find the faces and voices of middle South Africa; and few Daily Sun readers read Sunday Times, where they will see another world. In fact, our media is dominated by the voices of a social, political and economic elite, talking to each other.

Radio, where choices are driven by music choice and language, the silos could not have higher walls. Commercial radio, like television, is now based on careful niching, where groups defined by demographics are targeted.

Multichoice pay-TV is where wealthier people meet, crossing to some extent language and race barriers, but not class. Some programming, like Sewende Laan, draws audiences across some barriers. Some of our advertising – like Vodacom’s Jan and Elton – has different South Africans laughing at and with each other.

The government is often upset that the SABC does not do more to tell “their” story – what they are doing for South Africans. But what would be most useful would be if the SABC told government what South Africans are saying, thinking, wanting and needing.

The SABC could be our national coffee house and shebeen in one, where we sit together and share stories, ideas and lives. As SAFM says, let’s have the conversation. Only let’s make it a real chat, not a lecture, not a gossip.

My positive experiences of public broadcasting occurred during an interregnum, when uncertainty created gaps and opportunities. These slipped away from us as a new order took hold. The point now, with a new SABC leadership, is to try and recreate that sense of possibility.

*This was written for Beeld, 26 September 2009

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Radio, TV