South African Radio blackout a disgrace (1 April 1999)

1 April 1999

South African Radio blackout a disgrace

Trevor Chesterfield

EAST LONDON (South Africa) - For a company which prides itself on a public image and a has a lot to say about widespread coverage, those in charge of SABC should be placed in the stocks and have rotten eggs and a variety of foul smelling vegetables and fruit hurled in its direction as well.

The cause of complaint has been the total blackout by radio (and in some cases television) of a cricket season which has come and gone, almost unnoticed. Unless you are one of the lucky ones who can afford to buy an M-Net decoder.

Exhorted daily by the SABC advertising machine to buy a TV licence to pay for programmes you hardly watch because of their poor quality, anyone who was interested in last night's Standard Bank Cup final at Buffalo Park and was forced to rely on the radio for information would have been left in the dark.

In fact the domestic season's coverage leaves a lot more than your usual "much to be desired ..." comment. It is short of a disgrace.

We get a load of (yawn) gibberish relating to domestic soccer which SABC have been ladling down our throats summer and winter, day in day out, with some unintelligible commentators screaming at the top of their unintelligible voices (some guy called Evans is the main culprit). You get snap cricket scores of the SuperSport Series and even less of the Standard Bank games (League and Cup) lumped together when they announce a heap of racing results.

Now, if your interest in soccer is non-existent, and listening to racing results while waiting to hear what is happening to cricket games elsewhere in the country is your reason for having the radio on in the first place, it is an exercise in futility.

Cost factors, was one reason given why the SABC cannot broadcast domestic games; even for Test and limited-overs internationals sponsors are forced to put their hands in their pocket and come up with the cash. If they don't the games won't get broadcast. Not for soccer, not for rugby; sports of the privileged; packaged and labled for your entertainment whether you like them or not.

We have a radio station which divides its time up between religious programmes, music variety and sport. On the day of the Standard Bank Cup final we tuned in to 2000 and what did we hear ... ? Some sports news about soccer ... soccer ... soccer... . soccer ... rugby ... rugby ... rugby ... athletics, motor racing, Olympic Games scandal. boxing ... boxing ... a local marathon event being run on Saturday. Oh, and at the end ... "We can tell you that Border are batting first at Buffalo Park and Brad White is already out ... but more about that later."

That was the specialist sport radio channel's introduction to one of South Africa's domestic showpiece events. For those of us who weren't here, or did not have a decoder/satellite dish, tough luck.

In fact, if you listened to the sports news the day it happened, Northerns winning the Standard Bank League did not even make the headlines let along rate a one line mention.

While the SuperSport Series, formerly the Currie Cup, Castle Currie Cup etc ... is organisied by SABC's opposition and a match is screened on the SuperSport channel, the only way to keep up with the first-class games around the country is by linking in to CricInfo. But again, not everyone in South Africa can afford to link into CI or an M-Net decoder.

Those at Floundering Towers in Auckland Park, far from seeing that the paying public get a fair deal for their hard earned cash, in fact get nothing at all. It's as dictatorial as it was in the apartheid days. Rule by MIB or WIB (men or women in black). A public, or semi-public company should be accountable for the actions they take. Not SABC.

As it is, SABC's commitment to cricket, a sport which Dr Ali Bacher, managing director of the United Cricket Board would like to see become the "peoples game" is as flawed as the broadcasting system which takes our cash but doesn't enquire whether we are happy how it is spent.

Not everyone is interested in soccer ... soccer or rugby ... rugby and what SAFM's listenership is during a Saturday afternoon would be an entertaining statistic. As for me, I'm going to give it a miss from now on.

Source :: Trevor Chesterfield, Pretoria News