We probably won’t get a South African ‘Serial’ any time soon: here’s why

You may or may not have heard of Serial — a radio programme and podcast produced by WBEZ, an affiliate of National Public Radio in the US. Serial, as it says itself, is one story told week by week. It follows journalist Sarah Koenig’s attempt to get to the bottom of the real case of Adnan Syed. He’s a Baltimore man who has been in a Maryland prison since 2000 for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999, when they were both 18 — a crime he says he didn’t commit. The show ran over 12 weeks from October to December last year.

The fact that I’m reasonably confident you’ll either have heard of it or actually heard it, means Serial did something that many, many podcasts have never done. It attracted a massive audience. Not long after it started, it hit a staggering 5-million downloads and streams and, according to Apple, it got to that figure faster than any other podcast in iTunes’ history. It then spent weeks at the top of the iTunes podcast charts.

In the US, you were left out of many dinner party chats if you weren’t up to date with the latest developments, people mourned loudly on Facebook and Twitter when it took a break for Thanksgiving, there were podcasts about the podcast, it was even spoofed on Saturday Night Live. It was that big. The breakout podcast; the one that took things mainstream. If you haven’t, go and listen — just make sure you haven’t got much on for the next 24 hours or so. But this isn’t about what made the show so appealing.

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The other day I was having a conversation about the Serial phenomenon with someone who, knowing that I hang around in the world of radio and podcasting, said it would surely only be a matter of time before we had our own version. We are, he pointed out, a country awash with stories far more intriguing than Adnan’s. That’s certainly true. Plus, I’m delighted that Serial has got more people than ever talking about podcasts and, because of improvements in technology — iPhones, for instance, have built in podcatching software — I think more people are listening to them.

But, even though we might be more podcast happy, we have, I was sorry to say to my friend, a much bigger obstacle to overcome before we have our very own Serial. It wasn’t the fact that it was a podcast that made the series take off. What boosted Serial into the audio stratosphere was its content — the idea, the storytelling, the writing, the presentation, the production, the graft — oh god, the graft (while I was listening, I marvelled at the fact that Sarah Koenig alluded to entire lines of enquiry she followed but never used in the finished programme and that sometimes her producers spent days poring over phone records to back up the facts she delivered in just a couple of lines of script).

The sheer originality and quality of the thing was the key to its worming its way into the hearts and minds of so many people. Not the way it was accessed. They could have employed armies of men with CDs in cleft sticks to take it to their audience and it would have been every bit as popular. Where in South Africa are there people creating that kind of content? I’ll give you a bit of time to mull that one over. Anything? I thought not.

The bottom line is that, this kind of hit only happens when talented people are given the chance to take a risk on a new idea, when they have the skills, the time and the resources to work on something and make it truly excellent, to start something just because they’re fascinated by it. That’s exactly what happened here. Serial is the child of an existing programme, This American Life — a kind of audio version of the long form story, creatively produced and brilliantly researched. Koenig was a producer who found out about and then got caught up in the Adnan story. She thought this might be an interesting way of dealing with it. They said ‘go for it’. If we’re ever to produce radio, audio content, podcasts — call it what you will — of anything like this kind of quality and appeal, then there has to be room to do that — somewhere. Right now there is no room to do that anywhere.

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South African radio is completely and utterly commercially driven, formatted up the ying yang and contains very little if any room for innovation of any kind — let alone this kind. Because it’s possible to produce hours of cheap radio with one person and some music or phone calls (and therefore increase your chances of making stacks of cash) we’ve been doing just that for a very long time. We make content for sponsors and advertisers and not listeners. We take the line of least resistance and the result is airwaves clogged with bland, homogenised programming that relies for its appeal on the personalities of a few well-worn individuals. Just because radio, audio — whatever — can be done cheaply, there’s no reason that it has to be. Because you get what you pay for. Listen to the credit list at the end of Serial — it has two exec producers (including Sarah), a producer, a production manager and an editorial advisor. There are even two people writing the music for god’s sake (the music is particularly good).

This kind of set up is true not just for this programme or only in America. For instance, a chat show on BBC Radio 4 would typically have a presenter, a producer, possibly a researcher and a PA — and that’s for one hour of radio a week. On South African talk radio stations, one producer (or two if you’re lucky) is solely responsible for three hours of radio — a day. Before the radio bosses howl at me that the BBC is in the privileged position of not having to worry about its bottom line and therefore can afford such luxury whether it gets listeners or not, I have to howl back that Serial ended up with millions of listeners and, as the series progressess, you’ll hear the list of sponsor credits at the end grow and grow. The important difference is that it wasn’t made to attract those sponsors or even, as often happens in the world of commercial radio, at the request of those sponsors. It was made to tell a story, to entertain, to grip, brilliantly and with flair and it was made by people who dared to do something different — which is what led to it being so successful and, ultimately, commercial. It’s a case of if you build it, they will come.

And, don’t get me wrong, Serial wasn’t just some BBC-type, publicly funded fantasy. The programme was sponsored right from the beginning — by MailChimp (‘send better email’) — which brings me to another point. If we are to create our own Serial, then brands need to get a lot more courageous in their approach to sponsorship. When Serial started, no one had the first clue it would get the audience it did — or any audience, in fact — and, more importantly, no one could predict what the content would actually be. Koenig made the programmes as she felt her way through the story — it was part of its appeal.

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For all the sponsor knew, she might have discovered that not only was Adnan guilty, he had several more teenage girls buried in his parents back garden, or that most of the police who conducted the investigation were corrupt or any number of things that might have made life a bit tricky for a sponsor. But MailChimp took the risk, because they understood that the real value of sponsorship is associating yourself with innovative content and quality production — wherever that might lead. Not to ask producers to come up with bland, safe concepts tailor-made for your specific message. What has murder got to do with email? Nothing. What has MailChimp got to do with superb programming? Now — we all know — everything. Bazinga.

So I want Serial to do more than just turn people onto podcasts (there’s nothing different about a podcast anyway. Now we’re binge-guzzling House of Cards off Netflix, we’re all very used to getting our programmes from the net when we want them. In fact, if anything, Serial was more traditional in that it only aired and uploaded one episode per week. People were gagging for a Thursday for the next one — that Charles Dickens may have had the right idea after all). I want it to turn people onto superb content and, more than that, superb audio content that has not been conjured up in three minutes inspired by one phone call and a giveaway. How can that happen? I’m glad you asked.

Somehow, some people — and I think it has to be our media giants, in their stations or in association with some of our training institutions — have to make an investment into audio innovation and skills acquisition in South Africa. To say that, just for a moment, they’ll take their eye off the bottom line. They need to create space in which talent can be spotted and nurtured, expertise developed and ideas incubated, where time is a plentiful resource and, very importantly, where risks can be taken without Sanlam or Pick n Pay or Hyundai or KFC throwing their toys, but where sponsors with guts and gumption are willing to join the fray. (Or, to hell with it, in this global age of the internet, maybe we just go straight to MailChimp and see if they’ll stump up the readies. That’ll get our big brands a bit twitchy.)

Then those same media giants have to give their audiences the benefit of the doubt, trust that people have the imagination to be engaged by something because it’s really that good and give the work that comes out a real platform — whether it’s on the airwaves or the net. And if audiences don’t like that particular bit of content, to keep going anyway, because the next one might be the one. Only then will we have a chance of Serial SA.