A tribute to a South African TV critic: Goodbye Emsily Rose.

 

by Thinus Ferreira

The fraternity writing about television lost one of our own on Monday with the untimely passing of our friend and industry colleague, Emile Butler-O'Brien, who's unswerving dedication over decades to churning out schedules and information about TV helped millions of South African viewers about what they're watching who never knew his name.

His passing comes just a month after his dad died from Covid. As South African TV viewers we are poorer today in ways that most people won't be able to fathom, over something that most people who switch on their TV sets as part of their daily ritual, often just take for granted.

With a yellow highlighter and pen, nobody read a TV channel's monthly schedule better, and more meticulously dissected a schedule for the television gems it might hold, than Emile.
 
Day in and day out he would fire off dozens of questions and requests for clarifications to publicists asking whether that NCIS: New Orleans double-bill playout on 16 February is really two episodes if the season ends on episode 20 – and he always knew exactly who to ask.

Emile – who I've called by my nickname for him, Emsily Rose, ever since the 2005-film The Exorcism of Emily Rose because of a mistake I made that he hilariously had to correct – wrote articles that appeared in numerous places, did interviews with TV stars, and also typed up, corrected and oversaw a litany of TV schedules and grids printed in the TV section of numerous magazines and newspapers for Media24.

He did more interviews from South Africa with Bold's Brooke than I think anyone else ever will.
I first met Emile two decades ago at TVPlus magazine where I worked and laughed alongside him for half a decade and where Emile was the kid in school you wanted to chase and tried to surpass and who just slightly irritated you with his indefatigable work ethic.
 
See, my Emsily Rose was a bit like Emily in The Devils Wears Prada. 
 
His work was always done first. Emile's job bags for pages were always done before deadline (his favourite saying to time-wasters and publicists was always "Hi, I'm on deadline"). 

He was always ahead of everyone else. Yesterday a TV channel publicist told me Emile called last week … not looking for April – but asking for a May schedule already. That was typical Emsily Rose.
 
Emile was always the most-read in the room, always up to date with the latest reports from Hollywood and always finished with the work no matter how high the stack of Rumpelstiltskin TV hay he had to spin away. 

With an eagle eye he spotted schedule mistakes – both on the terrible drafts in various rough formats issued by TV channels, as well as on final layouts. 
 
Those ubiquitous TV pages and schedules in your magazines and newspapers were made so much better and enhanced purely because of Emile and his real passion for his work. It's something he saw as his duty – a contribution to better television in totality for South African viewers.
 
Who hasn't crossed paths with Emile and not hear him say the exact sentence of: "Jerry Shandrews has offered me an interview with ..." and then the name of an American TV star that Emile either will or has interviewed through his personal connections with overseas publicists?
 
 
On sea sand at midnight
Over many, many years we've lived through so many good, bad, hilarious and unbelievable adventures in TV land together – mostly on TV tour when TV channels and shows would invite the press covering television on TV junkets. 
 
It sounds all very "glamarama" but it's mostly not and a slog. In haplessness and helplessness we’d often find ourselves in bizarre situations only the people who've experienced it together can laugh at as you replay it later like watching a favourite sitcom rerun episode.
 
Once SABC2 invited the media to an evening year-end function for media somewhere outside of Johannesburg where literally nobody showed up except for Emsily Rose and myself. We only discovered we were alone once we arrived. 

Not a single SABC2 publicist showed because everyone cancelled and thought everyone else would go, and no Johannesburg media pitched while the two of us flew in from Cape Town.
 
There we were, in a hotel side hall, at night, filled with a mountain of shipped in sand to make it feel like summer at the sea, with rainbow umbrellas and beach chairs and waiters wanting to serve us cocktails. Just the two of us. 
 
He always loved Stoney ginger beer but we decided to splash out and sit in the deck chairs, on actual sand, in an empty room and drank piña coladas with little umbrellas under plastic palm trees until midnight – just another surreal day night you endlessly laugh about for years afterwards.
 
One year on a 2-day "journey to nowhere" cruise on a passenger ship, Emsily Rose got food poisoning.
 
Oh, how scared the man was to go see the ship's doctor and eventually returned after I forced him to go get an injection. "It was a Turkish doctor and he just told me ‘Turn around and pull down your pants!”. Emile’s face of indignation I'll never forget. The many stories can fill books.
 
Within the small ecosystem of journalists, writers and editors covering television in South Africa there's hardly any duplication – everyone does something slightly different and unique but all of us feed off of the collective work done by each other. Each one adds to the whole. How to replace Emile's immeasurable contribution over literally decades?
 
The guy worked so many weekends. 

How many times would I pitch up for a set visit during filming over weekends, or for a Saturday media roundtable in a hotel conference room with talent who didn't seem to be in the mood to answer questions, and there would be Emile – overprepared, and with stacks of printed out information – asking genuinely interesting questions that stars who realised that he had made a real effort couldn't help but become engaged with.
 
Besides being a walking TV guide – you really could ask him anything and he would know and answer you off the top of his head – Emile loved music and was a veritable Music Wikipedia. He listened to everything. He collected everything. He knew everything.
 
With tears in my eyes I can hear Emsily Rose telling me that this story isn't doing him justice. That I should tell the one where we fled a wave of poo coming at us on a bus in Durban, or how he always had the best spread of high-res publicity photos in all his folders ready for layout, or how Jerry Shandrew just ... well, you know.
 
Rest in peace, Emsily Rose. 

Change the channel to something hilarious – you always knew the best of what's on – and always so ready to tell about television. Take control of the TV remote, and educate them all where you're now with your insights and TV hot takes. 
 
We'll see you again, friend.