92. Adding TV Series to Growing Entertainment for African Audiences
I didn’t deliberately set out to write movies or TV series for Black audiences, but somehow opportunities continued to occur – and I enjoyed the challenge of writing them.
Albie Venter, the owner of Brigadier Films (named after his father Brigadier Venter), was not an easy person to work for. He insisted that I sit and watch about thirty American and British films in order to take memorable scenes from them. He could not conceive of the concept that I had plenty ideas of my own and did not need to plagiarize anyone else’s work. In the event, I did not “steal” any scenes from the movies I watched.
Albie asked me to write a series for Black audiences. When he outlined the theme of the series, I could hardly believe my ears. He wanted a comedy based on a man from outer space who fell out of his spacecraft over the Soweto townships. The man was Black and African in appearance in every respect except he had green hair!
The more I got into the story, the more it appealed to me. Green Man, as we called him, was a clumsy fellow – which is why he fell out of his spacecraft onto a road in the middle of Soweto. A motorist driving along the road saw someone lying on the ground with what looked like a motorcyclist’s helmet on his head. He stopped as the man recovered consciousness and, when he removed his helmet, his green hair was revealed. The Green Man had learned English before visiting planet Earth and explained he was from another planet. The Soweto man thought he’d encountered a lunatic but, being a hospitable sort of guy, he invited the Green Man to come home with him. He had a habit of drinking and staying out late – so when he arrived home, his wife took one look at the Green Man and chased her husband and his new friend from the house. The Green Man is not fazed and says that he has a tent with him where he can sleep the night. Furthermore, he can make it invisible – which is fine except that when the Soweto man’s wife tells her husband he can now come into the house, he trips over the invisible tent – convincing his wife that he is still drunk! The series goes on like this. It was very farcical, but the African audiences loved it. They have a great sense of humor and enjoyed the ridiculous, largely slapstick situations that the Green Man got into. There was talk of a second series, but nothing happened.
Some time went by before I was asked by a producer, Uwe Beckmann, to help a Black writer with a television series that would be broadcast in Zulu, called “Ubambo Lwami.” The writer had a good idea but no experience in writing for television. After a few sessions together, it became clear that I would have to write the scripts from a combination of his basic idea with some additional ideas from me. I did so, and the show went on to become a great success – so much so that the wife of the then-president of the country, Thabo Mbeki, refused to take appointments at the time the show was broadcast.
After I had given the finished scripts to the production team, Uwe approached me, somewhat embarrassed, and asked me if I would be prepared to give the Black writer the writing credit. He added that I would get a title as script editor. This was because of the sensitivity at the time of a white writer writing a Black TV series in the newly democratic South Africa. Wanting to do my part in making the new South Africa work, I agreed – although it hurt.
This pattern was repeated twice more. I then wrote “Ke bona Baloi,” a Pedi language series, translated from my English scripts. It was about the very real problem with witchcraft in the Northern and Mpumalanga provinces. Over 350 women had been burned to death in one year for nothing more than someone accusing them of being a witch. I wrote a story which had the police form a witchcraft squad to try to prevent these murders and, if not, to hunt down the killers. Again, it proved to be very successful and once again I was asked to give the writing credit to a lawyer in one of the provinces – whom I never met and who had no writing input whatsoever. The director, Noko Ramabula, and I became good friends over this period. He was one of the first Black TV directors in South Africa with some overseas experience. He did a fine job.
The third series I wrote during this period was “Muvhango.” The producer, Duma Ndlovu, had hired Noko to direct; he in turn had recommended me as the writer. Duma was a former political exile during the Apartheid years who had lived in New York and worked in theater there for about 20 years. He had no television experience and, although he had the basic idea of the story, he had no idea how to write it for the small screen. We established something of a love/hate relationship. He constantly complained that I had no idea about Black culture; and I nearly went mad as he constantly changed his mind and had me rewrite scene after scene. Meanwhile, he had me do a couple of treatments for other series. We even drove together along with an African American actor/director, Kevin Hooks (a friend of Duma’s from his New York days), to his family home outside of Bergville in the Drakensberg mountains (which was also the place where one of the stories he wanted me to write was based).
His story of “Muvhango” was a good one, based on a very real African situation. It told of an African store owner in Soweto townships who suddenly died. He was from an important family in the Venda region of the Northern Province. His wife was a Southern Sotho, originally from Lesotho. She set about preparing to bury her husband in the large cemetery in Soweto. She did not have traditional beliefs. Family members arrived from Venda to take the body back to their homeland. A common belief among the African people is that when a person dies, they must be taken back to the family home so that the person’s spirit may join the ancestors who look after the welfare of the living from beyond the grave. If the person is not buried in the right place, they will never become an ancestor. In the story, all hell breaks loose with the body being abducted and sent to Venda, then sent back and forth as the families feuded.
The first series was a huge success. For the second series, Duma was convinced that he could now write it all himself. He did hire me to edit the scripts; I believe they benefitted from the edits. In order to partially make up for this, Noko gave me an acting role as the bad-tempered old white judge who had to adjudicate the family squabbles as the legal battles continue to fly. The series ran for almost 20 years, although it became more and more of a “soapie” with the original plot long gone.
Well-known music producer Phil Hollis entering the movie business for the first time, asked me to write a five-part comedy for Senyaka, a Black comedian. It was called “Moruti wa Tsotsi.” I’ve never considered myself a comedy writer other than my earlier Green Man series but found that my memories of my days in British television in the 1950s working on shows featuring top comedians, such as Peter Sellars, Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine, Benny Hill and others, was helpful. It was a rich period of British comedy and it was pretty wild and whacky, strongly influenced by the hysterically funny “Goon Show” on radio.
I had already discovered that Africans enjoyed visual comedy. In addition, Senyaka, the lead actor, was a genuinely funny man and was prone to adlib in the middle of any dialogue scenes.The combination of his witty dialogue in the township mix of languages and my farcical sight gags worked very well. The storyline was based on a previous, poorly made short movie with Senyaka as a phony priest and faith healer, who would pay members of his congregation to limp up to the front of the church on crutches which they would throw away after he had “blessed” them. Blind people, wheelchair-based victims were part of the whole scam which kept on going horribly wrong. Shades of Burt Lancaster in the movie “Elmer Gantry” in an African setting – it was hilarious.
As usual, there were other projects for which I wrote treatments and sometimes full screenplays, but these were the major productions I wrote for Black audiences. Despite the appalling conditions and poor payment, I found these projects to be amongst the most challenging and often rewarding creatively I have ever worked on.
In many ways, writing these weekly blogs on the ExoTech website has also been one of my most fun writing projects. I do hope you readers also enjoy my many diverse and often weird adventures. It occurs to me that some of you may want to ask me questions about some of the places and activities in these blogs. Please feel free to email me at dresserchristopher@gmail.com and I’ll try to answer any queries or comments. Bear in mind that I don’t pretend to be an historian or political fundi (South African informal: an expert in a particular area). The opinions given in my blogs are entirely my own reflections on what I have observed.
As we move steadily towards the launch of ExoBrain under the ExoTech banner, I’m happy to continue (and even delve) into other areas with my blogs.
ExoTech will create a quantum shift in better communication; and I’ll be proud to have been even a small part of it.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.