The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has announced that it will cancel the long-running current affairs and investigative programme Special Assignment over bad TV ratings, as the show only managed to pull 103 000 viewers in August.
According to industry experts, the public broadcaster has a public mandate to do news and current affairs TV programming in all languages, regardless of viewership, with Special Assignment, which was the SABC’s only current affairs magazine show in English and which gets canned after 24 years without any replacement.
Earlier this week, Merlin Naicker, head of SABC video entertainment, told parliament that Special Assignment got canned due to low ratings. He further stated that the SABC decided to dump the show before developing a replacement.
The public broadcaster said it is working on a new show which will compete with M-Net’s Carte Blanche and e.tv’s Checkpoint with Nkepile Mabuse and Devi, fronted by Devi Sankaree Govender.
Merlin Naicker said, “Special Assignment achieved a 0.94 percentage share, or 103 000 viewers, which is below the target we’ve set ourselves as a channel. We will reduce content that is not delivering according to the standard or the target set, which is one of those that was not achieved. The show itself does not mean that it’s a poor show. It means that it’s not achieving the targets that we required.”
Naicker added, “We are working with our news team to figure out a better current affair show that can provide better service to the market.”
