SABC ruined a moment to cherish
OUR FAMILY excitedly settled down on Sunday afternoon to watch on the TV, the historic queen’s jubilee pageant featuring 1 000 vessels in a flotilla on the Thames.
Thank you Auntie SABC for ruining this once-in-a-lifetime breathtaking event for many of us who aren’t fortunate to have the DStv bouquet.
The SABC bungled the event as only it can.
For two hours it was unable to obtain the sound commentary, then it terminated the broadcast two hours early and replaced it with a mediocre old Frank Sinatra music show.
If the public broadcaster had an iota of decency and professionalism, a management spokesperson would have come on air to apologise and explain the reason for the hiatus. Perhaps they were all too embarrassed to face the long-suffering viewers, or maybe they all watch the pay-to-view contract channels and didn’t even notice what had transpired.
SABC-TV is getting steadily worse and it’s about time the government stepped in like it did in sport, and insist on a quantum leap in improving the festering status quo.
Like Bafana Bafana, in spite of having a surfeit of resources and funding at their disposal, there never seems to be any light at the end of the tunnel.
The SABC has the benefit of accessing revenue from viewer licence fees, commercial advertising and government financial assistance, and I wonder how it manages to make such a mess of things.
Maybe, like the Bafana debacle, it’s a case of abysmal management structures.
It’s a disgrace that the public are forced to pay for TV licences when, because of the dire fare available, they only watch alternate private channels and DVDs.
In the pioneering days of South African telly in the 1970s, when there was only one channel, there was more quality fare to watch than is available today on three channels.
There was always some toprated imported show on that solitary channel, whereas now there is a surfeit of “C” grade offerings repeated ad infinitum.
Once a show has been flighted on SABC3, you see it again a couple of weeks later on SABC1 or 2. It’s a crazy nightmare programming debacle of destructive cost-cutting. They seem to have largely exhausted trawling the archives for decades-old Afrikaans dramas to repeat, and now they have gone to the stock rooms to haul out dusty 30-year-old tapes of American shows like McGyver and the Cosby Show.
We all know that the SABC is in a parlous financial state, but surely it can get in outside experts to turn around the floundering behemoth’s for- tunes, and cut costs without chasing the majority of viewers away due to the disgraceful paucity of viewing material.
Many years ago an enterprising television critic on the Sunday Times used to do a weekly feature in her column showing an hourly comparison between the sole SABC channel and other national broadcasters around the world such as in the US, the BBC in the UK and the ABC of Australia, many of which rely only on TV licences and receive no advertising revenue.
She managed to shame the SABC into improving the quality of its shows, but I think the current programme managers are beyond shame.
Unfortunately, e-tv haven’t capitalised on the malaise of the SABC at all and seems to have a culture of producing the lowest common denominator of shows such as the infantile Cheaters and the yobbish WWW Wrestling. When the one show with appeal to intelligent viewers, 3rd Degree, is not sidelined by European soccer broadcasts, its standard has dropped markedly since its early days of enterprising journalism. It probably needs an injection of young creative blood.
I don’t know what the answer is to improve the dire fare available, but maybe if the programme managers were locked in a room and forced to watch their own channels every evening instead of migrating to DStv there might be some marked improvement. Patricia Pleasance