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Local can indeed be lekker... so why isn't it?

"Am I allowed to swear on this show?"

This was a response by local actor Brandon Auret when questioned recently on a talk show about what he thought of the current state of South African television.

Brandon, best know by many for his role as Dup in Isidingo, is certainly no stranger to South African television, but expressed his dissatisfaction with the local media, saying that unless you are happy to work as a soapie actor, there really isn't much out there.

Certainly, South Africans do have the ability to create decent and intelligent productions. This is evident in movies like Faith Like Potatoes and Dollars and White Pipes. Films like these have proved that you don't need a big Hollywood actor or the budget to match in order to make a good film.

But that just begs the question of why, if there are such capable film makers, actors, writers and producers out there, are we still producing such low quality television?

MNet subscribers will by now have seen the new "comedy" sitcom, and I use the term very lightly, The Coconuts.

The show's premise centres around a white upper-class family who, by some turn or another, are transformed into a black family and their black domestic worker into a white person.

Each week for half an hour the show's amateurish cast belt out every tired joke there is on issues like racism and affirmative action.

One can see the intention of the programme's creators was obviously to push the envelope and step just ever so slightly over the line of political correctness.

The problem is that they seem to have misjudged the intelligence of their viewers. In other words, they think we are morons.

A common mistake made by many a local filmmaker.

It is just ludicrous for them to expect their viewers to watch shows like Heroes, CSI, Prison Break and Desperate Housewives that make use of wit and intrigue to capture their audience each week, and then expect us take some of these local blunders seriously.

And, almost as if they were trained by government, the TV-powers-that-be choose to create more problems rather than attempt to create solutions.

In other words, the money that could be spent on hiring and training decent script writers and upping the quality of our local programming, they instead spend on creating SA versions of cheesy reality TV shows.

As an unknown author once quite aptly put it, "I wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called 'brightness', but that doesn't work."

I suppose the only thing we mere viewers, the audience, the people they are supposedly trying to entertain, can do is either switch off our brains and hope for the best.

Alternatively we could follow the lead of Jack Paar, who said, "I have never seen a bad television programme, because I refuse to. God gave me a mind, and a wrist that turns things off."

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