SAFTA Nominees: News and actuality highlights

The 2017 SAFTA Nominees were announced this past week. As usual, there was once again controversy around soap nominations but here are the news and actuality highlights:

Best Current Affairs Actuality Programme
Carte Blanche (Combined Artists)
Saving Microbabies (Combined Artistic Productions)
Spieners (SABC)
So in other words, Carte Blanche is nominated as a show, and then a feature on Carte Blanche gets nominated in the exact same category. Okay then.

Best Magazine Show
50/50 (Clive Morris Productions)
All Access Mzansi (Burnt Onion Productions)
The Man Cave (Cheeky Pictures)

Best Variety Show
Expresso (Cardova Productions)
Jou Ma se Chef (Cheeky Pictures)
Sarah Graham Food Safari Season 1 (Okuhle Media)

I'm not exactly sure how a daily live multi-hour breakfast show(Expresso) can be directly compared to shorter, recorded and edited, episodic shows. 

Best Talk Show

Real Talk with Anele (Cheeky Media)

Republiek van Zoid Afrika (Brainwave Productions)

The Chatroom (Toxmedia)

Best Talk Show Host

Anele Mdoda - Real Talk With Anele

Karen Zoid - Republiek van Zoid Afrika

Bonnie Mbuli - Afternoon Express

In addition, ZA News, currently South Africa's only news satire programme, is nominated in eight of the Comedy categories, behind Those Who Can't, which managed to grab ten nominations.

eNCA. SABC News  Channel. ANN7. CNBC Africa. BDTV. These are the names of South Africa's FIVE 24 hour news channels. The only thing close to a nomination in an actuality or documentary or any category that these channels got was a nomination for a South African Heroes insert on eNCA. Even that features on etv so it doesn't really count.South Africa's news channels need to really consider the quality and not the quantity of their documentary and actuality programming going forward.

The awards take place on Thursday, 16 and Saturday, 18 March 2017 at Sun City.The Saturday ceremony, which is where ZA News will likely shine, will be broadcast live on SABC2.