The logistics of running ‘Carte Blanche’ ... from Ireland
Question: When did your Carte Blanche career begin?
Answer: I’ve been at Carte Blanche since 2004. My first story was about a helicopter attack in Iraq that was captured on film and civilians were gunned down. It was quite an odd story to do for a show like Carte Blanche. I then became a producer/presenter and then I moved to Ireland in 2018 and started producing European-type content. I did pieces on Chernobyl, prisons in Norway, drug use in Portugal.
When did you get promoted into the hot seat?
It was going well and then the pandemic hit and I got a call from (former executive producer) George Mazarakis in 2021 asking whether I’d be interested in doing it. I was obviously very, very keen. I just wasn’t sure how it was going to work practically. It wasn’t his expectation that I would come back to SA.
He had seen how ‘Carte Blanche’ was operating during the pandemic when the executive team moved almost entirely online, so that was the solution we found; that I would come here fairly regularly and then be online for the rest of the time.
So how does it work, logistically?
I am generally here every six to eight weeks and I’m here for two or three weeks at a time. I have factto-face meetings, I reconnect with the team and I immerse myself in what is happening in the country — a sense of what the zeitgeist is. It’s not without challenges, but generally it works.
What is your connection to Ireland?
I met my wife Emma in Somerset West. I used to live on a wine estate and would frequent a hotel there and she was on a working holiday and she walked into a restaurant where I was at the time and she was holding two plates of deepfried fish and chips and I fell immediately in love.
She took much longer to feel the same way. And then she came out and joined me in SA and we spent many great years in Cape Town.
We got married in Ireland and spent some time there and then spent another five years in SA and had a child. We now have two little girls, Jessica who is 10, and Isabel, who is eight.
There has been a lot of back and forth between SA and Ireland.
Are you ever 100% comfortable with where you settle?
I don’t know. I still feel the pull of SA, but at the moment that is where we find ourselves, in Ireland.
What does life in Ireland look like for you and your family?
We live 45 minutes from Dublin in Kildare County. The nearest village is not even big enough to call a one-horse town! It’s called Moone. We live across the road more or less from the family farm and are surrounded by rolling green hills and that is where we spend our time.
The death of Carte Blanche stalwart Derek Watts traumatised viewers. What did losing him mean to you?
It was unexpected, it was challenging, it was depressing in a lot of ways because I’d been a colleague of his for a very long time. Even though we didn’t spend a huge amount of time together, there was this connection.
And then there was trying to manage what was happening, if that’s the right word. There is no recipe for it.
Initially he was adamant that he wanted to work through his cancer treatment and he was doing very well.
And then he got sepsis and could no longer be on screen and that was really when he disappeared and to be perfectly honest it was difficult to try to figure out how to do it.
We tried our best and I think ultimately navigated it as best we could and did right by him.
And then his death came as a complete shock. I was phoned by his wife on the day of his passing and it was a struggle for a long time.
His absence is keenly felt. He was very close to all his colleagues. He was a valued member of the team and people loved him and I think his absence is still being felt, but we are soldiering on. We are doing as best we can to ensure his legacy lives on.
What are the most important stories in SA now?
That’s a great question because it’s something we grapple with all the time.
I don’t know if there’s a scientific answer to it except in the word that we always use which is story. We don’t do reports. We don’t do rapportage.
We have to tell stories because we have longer durations and our show is a very specific type of show.
If we are looking to highlight an issue we always look for a story that helps us to ventilate that issue. That is generally the case studies, the people we choose to interview.
We try to get a bit of a backstory, we try to build dimensions around their characters.
It’s a strange twilight zone because we’re caught between a two-minute news report and a one-hour documentary.
We can do more than the two minutes, but obviously can’t go into the kind of detail a documentary does.
So we do the best we can, but I think we try to bleed in elements of the longer format so that we can tell the character story because what is vital to us is that an emotional connection is made between the viewer and the person whose story we’re telling.
What would you say the biggest or most impactful story has been this year?
I think the human trafficking one in which we went undercover into the centre of Randburg and uncovered a world I don’t think too many people know exists. It’s ripe for human trafficking and child trafficking in particular.
Towards the end of last year we also did two very significant investigations.
One was on Ikhwezi Lokusa [in Mthatha], a school that looked after children with special needs and was completely letting them down. It was horrific. We tried to bring about some sort of accountability and did that fairly successfully though it’s not a completely positive outcome.
And then we did a story on Zuko Nonxuba, the [Eastern Cape] lawyer who was ripping off the families of children with disabilities. We have forced a level of accountability on that as well.
I think those stories spring to mind. Primarily because we were able to bring about some sort of change.
So your objective then is to bring about change, not just to inform?
That is an interesting question because it is not, I don’t think, an obvious function of a journalist to be an activist.
But I think sometimes what you should strive for in telling your story is to tell it in such a way people simply cannot turn a blind eye. And hopefully that brings about change.
And stay on top of it — keep going back, keep asking the questions, even if we don’t do a story that makes it to air. We keep making the phone calls. Sometimes we do another update on screen but on other occasions we just keep on tightening the screws to get some kind of accountability, of change.
And the good news stories, you find them too.
Part of our responsibility is to inspire and not to create the impression that SA is just about bad news because it’s not.
The good news is to be found in the people and the personalities and so we go in search of them and we tell their stories.
We make a point of doing at least one in every show. Not only to balance out some of the darkness, but also to create the impression that there is reason to be optimistic.
If there is optimism, why did you leave SA?
We didn’t leave because we weren’t optimistic. We loved Cape Town, we loved the country.
There were one or two personal family issues that initially took us there.
Then the pandemic hit which changed everybody’s plans around the world.
For the moment that is where we find ourselves, but it’s not because we don’t like SA.
In fact, if you had to pin me down and ask me, I’d say that I certainly prefer SA, but there are other considerations.
Who knows what the future holds? I wouldn’t close the door on our return. I think my wife would be quite pleased with that outcome. She loves it here.
* Carte Blanche is on M-net at 7pm every Sunday.