by Thinus Ferreira
The National Film and Video Foundation's delayed, then rushed, then badly done broadcast of the 19th South African Film and Television Awards (SAFTAs) was an embarrassment to the country's TV and film industry.
Yet, perhaps, in all its faults and haphazard on-air mistakes as it stumbles along, it needs to be this way, since it ironically, and unintentionally, mirrors a troubled and haphazard local film biz deeply mired in crisis.
Saturday night's 19th SAFTAs, organised by the taxpayer-funded NFVF and supposed to uplift and showcase the film and TV industry, showed SABC2 and Mzansi Magic viewers on DStv how the industry wasn't able to pull off a decent live broadcast ceremony about itself.
Once again produced by Black Swan Media and staged at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Johannesburg with a SuperSport outside broadcast unit, the 19th SAFTAs - which was supposed to end at 23:00, then envisioned 23:25, and then 23:45, ran long over what its length was supposed to be, eventually ending a few minutes before midnight.
By that time, capable host Anele Mgudlwa was really just speaking to the camera after the majority of the in-attendance audience had abandoned the room for the open bar and left a sea of empty seats.
Multiple times she had to call for whoever had to appear next from behind the stage, to hurry up.
For a ceremony themed "One story, one industry, one future" the TV awards show story was often interrupted - including a break for a "live Lotto draw" (but only seen on one channel), interrupting the flow, narrative and tempo of the ceremony.
In what could have been a big celebration of the 50th anniversary of television in South Africa was reduced to a short insert, which could have been and should have been longer.
Meanwhile, the run-over-time night was padded with unnecessary inserts like "Afrikaans is 100" (which was last year) and felt out of place, especially when you need to shave off time.
The 19th SAFTAs had Onke Dumeko as acting NFVF and acting SAFTAs committee chairperson, Relebogile Mabotja as executive producer, with Bruce Townsend as show producer and Eugene Naidoo as show director. Azania Muendane was creative producer, with Sive Black Rose Nkukwana as head of content.
An uninspiring square-themed stage design with a blocky, modular stage done by JDMUnlimited felt plain and boring - wasn't it possible to do more or be more inventive with a type of homage to 50 years of TV past, and future?
The main mic was one length and those too short and too tall had no choice but to try do their best.
Built-in irony abounded: Golden Horns were handed out to several recently cancelled and stopped shows. Recipients for shows from e'.tv's Scandal! and Kelders van Geheime, to the Showmax Original Youngins had the somewhat cringe-worthy task of thanking the very channels, platforms and people that actually ended them.
While going to stage was a tribute to success and peer recognition, it also made the 19th SAFTAs feel like a eulogy for a very troubled industry.
As usual, fixable sound errors remained persistent throughout, as was the litany of small white squares with numbers on the backrests, showcasing empty chairs all through the night - even in the front row.
So many film students with their own best garb, for a R100 gift card and a small meal would sit in an overflow room patiently, line up in a queue, and be willing to be sped to empty chairs as seat-fillers. Their biggest prize would actually be for the moment to sit for a few minutes next to a soap or film star they recognised and adore. So why isn't this done?
If floor managers for recorded shows ably fill all seats to make a show look popular and desirable to recipients of the illusion - the viewers watching - why isn't the floor manager at the SAFTAs doing this and the issue of many visible empty seats never solved?
Category presenters mangled the pronunciation of names across the spectrum, which they were seemingly never audibly told how to say, while several struggled to read. Multiple category winners were no-shows without explanation.
If category winners are organised and shipped in to be present, why the lack of columns on the Excel spreadsheet and check boxes on it with "presenter got a voicenote with names pronunciation", "presenter sent back voicenote audible test", "presenter passed"? It's so easy within the show production actionables to do. And yet ...
When the very people the NFVF and SAFTAs deem "fit" to be on stage to "showcase" and represent the industry can't get each other's names and shows right, what message is the NFVF and the industry sending to the industry and viewers? Because it comes across as one of carelessness.
The In Memoriam segment was done properly this year at the 19th SAFTAs.
All names of the dearly departed - although this segment to honour the dead was commercialised with a sponsor - were shown and legible.
It was only marred by behind-the-scenes audio once again filtering through and that was audible alongside the song being sung. Who said : "No I didn't get anything"? Why wasn't that mic muted?
Speaking of sound, the echo viewers heard through the night is because the SAFTAs sound team was unable to properly separate the house mix (the sound attendees heard inside the venue) with the sound send as broadcast playout.
It's something which actually "helped" since the playout audio channel apparently was muted sometimes, or something else was wrong, and then all viewers got was the muffled house sound from, for instance, a handheld mic that at least came through to viewers as well.
On almost every nominees introduction clip, the whole last part was muted with no sound. Bad mute button timing?
A wall card graphic on the stage video wall would, for instance, read "Frank Opperman. Best actor in a TV". Who is supposed to check and double-check all of these sloppy, unnecessary mistakes like that the word "drama" is missing, and why isn't it done?
Host Anele deserves kudos for doing as well as she could to lift the weight of a live TV broadcast so wieldy not even Atlas can really carry it alone.
As best she could, it was fully left up to her to be "bad cop" and interrupt and get some people off stage, or to move them, like the one Lifetime Achievement award recipient, Magic Hlatshwayo, who kept going and who she had to somehow stop.
Multiple times, Anele had to wrangle the ill-fitted Gayton McKenzie, South Africa's minister of arts, culture and sports, who kept buzzing back on stage like a pesky mosquito you can't quite get rid of.
Gayton McKenzie's presence and rhetoric were superfluous and vacuous.
Cut out of the 19th SAFTAs ceremony and reduced to a one-minute recorded monodribble, it would have saved a lot of time and prevented his jarring, inappropriate jokes that didn't land and rambling remarks.
Probably Anele's most pointed and best barb of the night to the limelight-craving McKenzie, after some constant babbling and the umpteenth time of him spouting vapid promises to an industry tired of government rhetoric and no action, was: "I gave him that SAFTA for the lifetime achievement of promises. Promises, promises".
Even in the end credits with spelling mistakes and typos, viewers got "Nicola van Niekerk" at MultiChoice as part of the SAFTAs committee, and then again as "Nicola Auret" later as MultiChoice's executive head of programming. It's the same person. Who checks these things? And shouldn't the SAFTAs know?
Do all these SAFTAs-involved people in the end-credits actually talk to each other? Sadly, it doesn't come across that way.
The 19th SAFTAs once again made MultiChoice, M-Net, the SABC, e.tv, TV channels like kykNET, Mzansi Magic, and streamers like Netflix look bad - and this is when they're supposedly working together on the SAFTAs.
Anele closed the broadcast, noting, "We all worry about how we're going to keep the industry afloat. Let's be an audience. The best thing we can do is support each other. Let's watch each other's projects."
Perhaps a wounded industry needs a flawed SAFTAs broadcast. Perhaps, sadly, it's what the industry and viewers deserve.
Perhaps viewers need to see that the NFVF can't do the SAFTAs better because it is simply mirroring an industry on life support, battling to just keep breathing.
