by Thinus Ferreira
Aletta Alberts watched television, but what she really always saw was the future.
With the passing of MultiChoice's content boss on Tuesday from Covid-19 complications, a day before her 57th birthday today, South Africa and the entire African continent lost an irreplaceable, Most Valuable Player in the TV industry space.
Aletta was someone who lived and breathed the television biz and who worked at making it the best she possibly could for viewers within the confines of the existing industry parameters - because she herself really was one.
The unassuming doyenne of TV content who was friends with the likes of homegrown Hollywood-royalty like Charlize Theron and who travelled the world speaking to everybody and sought out the most terrific telly, really loved television but Aletta was in Love with books and opera and art as well.
She once told me that when she was growing up - and because of limited choices in South Africa at the time, she had dreams of joining the circus. Eventually she did end up in one: The insane, yet magical world of television.
"You know what's unreal?" she told me last year.
"It's incredibly exciting to consume all of this amazing content. But the most amazing part is sitting in a room as someone from South Africa and you literally get to meet and get to talk face-to-face to all of the CEOs of the biggest streamers like the Reed Hastings and the biggest international content distributors and the biggest TV companies in America and the world. You don't just get to read about the best minds in television, you get to talk to them."
The visionary and creative content boss with her eclectic fashion style and vintage 1940s Cat-eye frames (imported, you should know!) truly saw the world - and television - in true technicolour.
Aletta constantly, brilliantly broke preconceived rules and ideas and seamlessly meshed together the worlds of on-screen make-belief with the industry-intricacies of difficult behind-the-scenes decisions.
If there ever were an Oracle of Awesome in terms of television, it was Aletta. She didn't look up answers about TV - either about the in-show content or the making of - she knew it innately and answered it off the top of her head.
Like the fictional karate master Mister Miyagi, Aletta Alberts most-often taught through "wax on, wax off" examples.
She would explain, with real-world examples and anecdotes, why something in or on television did or didn't work or wasn't going to work, why something was brilliant and was often spot-on in spotting the next big TV trend coming before it went mainstream.
I first met Aletta when she was SABC2 channel boss and the public broadcaster's channel would still do quarterly press screenings for the media.
After she presented upcoming shows, on the sidelines and off-the-record, she would take questions. That's where I realised that she was like a know-it-all Annalise Keating but in the best way possible, the professor teaching students in How to Get Away with Murder, long before that character was even a TV show.
Aletta once, frustratingly but in jest, called SABC2 "the funeral channel" because of all of the official public funerals she was forced to suddenly put on her channel's schedule. It upset her that she had to mess up her channel's carefully curated programming plans for viewers mapped out months and weeks in advance.
For Aletta the viewer experience was everything.
In Auckland Park and later inside MultiChoice's sprawling Randburg-based complex, she played TV circus ringmaster to the best level that she could, trying to give those giving their time to watch, not just television, but an experience.
When DStv added and launched The Disney Channel many years ago, it did so at an event where MultiChoice wrongly had too few seats for the media showing up. Many were left standing.
Aletta stood up from her seat and walked over to me and I realised she's walking to me. While I felt as if I could sink into the ground and wanted to disappear, she said: "Ag my Liewe Thinus, please go sit in my chair".
I protested and said "No, I can't". And she said words I'll never forget: "We're doing these things for you guys who give us your time and attention to attend. We're nothing without the support of the media." Of course I never took her seat but I've never forgotten that gesture.
I would pester her so relentlessly after press events about the Syfy channel and constantly asking when DStv is going to add it (because it was a personal desired TV channel) that she one day said fake-sternly, complete with a somewhat put-on "exhausted eye-roll" like a mother to a child begging for sweets: "You've asked me thousand times Thinus and we're not going to add Syfy because it's too niche."
After a lot of reporting after MultiChoice was embroiled in acrimonious behind-the-scenes negotiations in late-2019 with A+E Networks after deciding to drop the History, Crime+Investigation and Lifetime channels (and then kept History and Lifetime), Aletta was clearly quite miffed with me.
Her three sentences to me with an admonishing tone, like a lecturer handing back assignments and expecting better from the student, were: "I saw your coverage Thinus. I thought you knew how television works. These things happen."
From streaming to "stacking", to "connected devices" and from time-shifted viewing to the complex and ever-evolving content discovery process, Aletta Alberts always saw the next TV technology rising on the horizon before many of the rest and could quickly see how it would influence and impact on the end-consumer and viewer experience.
After trips to the annual LA Screenings she sometimes would enthusiastically pop open her laptop to some of the media and go: "You just Have to watch the trailer of this upcoming new show about this-and-this".
In our last off-the-record talk, I was the kid seeking TV sweets again, bemoaning the lack of the Disney+ streaming service on the DStv Explora.
"In time, liewe Thinus, in time," she said. "Eventually all of the Disney+'es of the world and everything will sit on the box and you can go bos. DStv and pay-TV all over the world is evolving and fast. You will get an even better curated content experience. Just relax and enjoy the process."
I'll end with Aletta Alberts' iconic refrain to the media covering television, for over two decades, that she used to end basically all of her presentations to the press with: "When we perhaps mess up, please write to us to let us know and report about us so that we can do better. But when we do good, also please write about us and give us coverage so that viewers and the industry can know what great content is coming their way that they just have to watch."
