SUNDAY NIGHT FEVER
25 YEARS OF CARTE BLANCHE
ARTE Blanche’s offices in Randburg are smaller and quieter than you might imagine. Apart from the imposing “Carte Blanche” insignia in reception and the awards (157 of them) lining the walls and perched atop filing cabinets, you would think you were in a law office or an accountancy firm, and a small one at that.
It is perhaps fitting that a show that has so often fought for the underdog — and usually won with a bloody, knock-out punch — has operated for the past 25 years with a staff and a budget far smaller than its international counterparts.
The team of presenters and editorial and production staff amounts to less than 30 people. According to the show’s executive producer, George Mazarakis, the US show 60 Minutes sometimes spends the same amount on a single story as Carte Blanche would budget for three months’ worth of production. Carte Blanche has competed against 60 Minutes for international awards, and won.
Its tenacity to unravel truth and excel at any cost continues to make the show a Sunday night staple for millions of people.
“I hate to blow our trumpet in that way, but it’s true,” Mazarakis said. “We perform minor miracles with the resources at our disposal in comparison to our competitors in the US and Australia.”
Mazarakis took the reins at Carte Blanche in 1995, seven years after its first broadcast. In 1988, Louis Moller— owner of Combined Artists Productions, which still produces the show — was placed at the helm alongside charismatic director Bill Faure. M-Net (also still in its infancy) asked them to create a programme similar to 60 Minutes.
At the time, Carte Blanche was not allowed to broadcast anything that could be construed as “news”, because the SABC (the government) vehemently protected its exclusive ownership of that domain.
It was up to Moller and Faure to come up with original content that challenged the status quo but that did not provoke the government’s paranoia.
In a new book celebrating Carte Blanche’s 25th anniversary, writer Jessica Pitchford says Faure “would walk into a room, throw ideas into the air like burning silver balls, then disappear in his beloved RollsRoyce, leaving everyone to catch and make sense of them”.
Mazarakis became the heir to a rather different show to the one we see today. He had a deep background in news and it was this newsy, investigative element — now the show’s trademark — that Mazarakis introduced. “I inherited what I would have called a female magazine show,” he said.
“On the on-set logo, the ‘Carte’ was in silver and the ‘Blanche’ was in pink, which was very odd. As soon as I could I changed it to blue.
“I’m not for any minute suggesting that there was anything bad about the show before — it was brilliant already and they had set a style, but it was like watching a wellproduced version of Cosmopolitan magazine. Of course, that was when Cosmopolitan was at its height and magazines like that played a very important role in society.”
To do more investigative work, Mazarakis brought in more researchers ( Carte Blanche now has six permanent researchers) and the show, which Mazarakis was told had already “matured” and did not have much “growth potential”, ripened dramatically.
The strange thing was that neither of the show’s original presenters, Derek Watts and Ruda Landman — whom the nation has come to view as hardcore investigative journalists — had any background in this confrontational form of
We were out to have a good time and make good TV
reporting. They had to grow into it as the show, and the country, transformed. Watts originally came from the SABC’s sports department and Landman had been an SABC newsreader.
“We did not set out to be a political watchdog,” said Landman, who left the show in June 2007. “We were a Sunday night magazine show. The country was so different; the mood was so different. In the beginning, we were not a crusading band setting out to set the world to rights. We were out to have a good time and make good TV — have a good gig for a year or two.”
But it became a matter of perfect timing. By the early 1990s, the country was on the brink of colossal political and social change. The ANC was no longer banned. Nelson Mandela was released. Black pupils were admitted to white schools. There were elections and violence and mixed marriages. Carte Blanche covered it all.
“It was the most amazing time to be a journalist,” said Landman. “The whole world’s journalists were here. We were the story.”
Laughing wryly, Landman recalled the time that Carte Blanche spent a day in Alexandra in 1989. It was a groundbreaking story and the first for which the programme won an award.
Of all the stories that affected Landman, and there were many, the one that changed her forever was the programme’s coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996. “I am deeply Afrikaans, so it forced me to reinterpret and recalibrate the way I saw my own people,” she said.
“I suddenly came to realise that we can be as horrible and dishonourable as anyone else, and it was a huge thing to take into my world.”
Turning the mirror on its viewers is something Carte Blanche has never been afraid of doing. Whether we like it or not, the show sometimes exposes South Africa’s worst realities and nobody, no matter their colour, status or political slant, goes unchecked. In this way, Carte Blanche has been the flint that has ignited many a conversation or debate across all South Africa’s social groups, whether over the cubicle at work or in your lounge with your family.
Watts, who is still on the show after 25 years, reckons the programme’s name has been crucial to its success.
The title originated when M-Net invited the public to come up with a name for a new magazine show. The winning idea came from a young boy in Cape Town, who won R10 000.
“I think the name changed the show,” Watts said, “because throughout the years when we’ve wanted to do something bizarre or crazy, we always say: ‘Well, we have carte blanche, we can do anything.’ That’s what was so exciting at the beginning. We started with a government that was going out of power and was not interested in tightening the reins of Carte Blanche. Then we had democracy and the ANC did not want to be seen to be closing in on one of the top programmes, so we’ve been in the middle of it.”
The chemistry between Landman and Watts — who remain the anchors who stayed the longest on South African television — was also crucial to the show. The insouciant Watts was often the foil to Landman’s more conservative mien. As Landman pointed out, they became such an institution that if one of them was not in the studio on a Sunday, the other had to tell the audience why, although it was always Watts who was more comfortable with the off-screen attention the pair attracted.
“I never minded the fame thing,” Watts said. “Maybe it’s because I’m from Bulawayo. There, everyone knows everyone, so I grew into it easily. Ruda never wanted to be a star, which was good because we never fought for the limelight. That is the real secret of that relationship.”
Watts’s most memorable adventures include trips to warravaged Gaza and Bosnia, time aboard the USS George Washington aircraft carrier, being in Russia with Mark Shuttleworth as he prepared to go into space, and almost perishing of hypothermia on Mount Kiliman- jaro: “I was one little snooze away from death.” He said the rudest people he interviewed were Anna Kournikova and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Because of Mazarakis, Watts and the current crop of presenters — Bongani Bingwa, Devi Sankaree Govender and Neo Motaung — Carte Blanche continues to entertain, upset and downright offend millions of South Africans each Sunday.
Mazarakis is keenly aware of what is required to prevent the show, which is the longest-running, no-breaks TV programme in South Africa, from stagnating: a young staff and an uncompromising knack for answering the questions the nation is asking, even if the answers are unpleasant.
“When it comes to the stories we decide to show, you’ve got to separate the wheat from the chaff. You’ve got to be discerning,” Mazarakis said.
“But you’ve also got to listen. They [the public] vote by eyeballs. If they don’t like what they see, you don’t get the eyeballs. Simple.”