by Thinus Ferreira
The South African public broadcaster is finally confirming that it cancelled the long-running current affairs and investigative magazine programme Special Assignment on SABC3 in August over bad TV ratings because the show only managed to pull 103 000 viewers.
The public broadcaster has a public mandate to do news and current affairs TV programming, in all languages and regardless of viewership, with Special Assignment which was the SABC's sole current affairs magazine show in English and which got canned after 24 years without any replacement.
Co-incidentally, Special Assignment is the show that SABC top executives used as a scapegoat a few months before its broadcast axing, to oust the SABC's former head of news, Phathiswa Magopeni, who is now set to return to the SABC as one of the new board members.
After an episode of Special Assignment was broadcast while the story under investigation about South Africa's towtruck-industry was still under a court interdict, SABC execs blamed Phathiswa Magopeni and alleged during a disciplinary hearing that it was her fault and mistake that the episode was shown.
Special Assignment producers and staff defended Phathiswa Magopeni and blamed the SABC's archaic and byzantine content labelling system for the mistake.
Merlin Naicker, head of SABC video entertainment, told parliament this week that Special Assignment got canned because of lousy ratings. The SABC decided to dump the show before developing a replacement and four months after its abrupt removal there's been no new replacement.
The SABC says it is working on coming up with a new show which will compete with M-Net's (DStv 101) Carte Blanche on a Sunday evening and e.tv's Checkpoint with Nkepile Mabuse and Devi fronted by Devi Sankaree Govender.
"Special Assignment achieved a 0.94 percentage share, or 103 000 viewers which is below the target that we've set ourselves as a channel," Merlin Naicker said.
"We will reduce content that is not delivering according to the standard or according to the target set and this is one of those that was not achieving. The show itself does not mean that it's a poor show. It means that it's not achieving the targets that we required."
"We are working with our news team to figure out a better current affairs show that can better service the market," he said.
