Channels Television’s satire show, The Other News, has proved to be a hit, bringing in new types of viewers for the station and reaching an audience of two million.
Neil McCafferty of Pilot Media Initiatives, which partnered with Channels Television in conceptualising the programme, said this in an interview with Balancing Act, a consultancy and research company, which is focused on telecoms, Internet and broadcast in Africa.
According to him, the first season of the show which aired about a year ago did incredibly well and got between one million and 1.5 million viewers in its time slot.
The biggest competition for the programme was from football and by the end of season 3, it was pulling two million viewers.
McCafferty told Balancing Act CEO, Russel Southwood how The Other News was conceptualised.
He said, “My colleague Dillon Case (Co-founder and CEO, Pilot Media Initiatives) was working on a project with substantial media impact. He was very interested in satire and had a lot of contacts with the Daily Show (in the USA). He launched a show called Studio 7 which ran for several series on a local TV station. And it was out of this experience that he set up Pilot Media Initiatives.”
So, Pilot Media Initiatives got in touch with the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of Channels Media Group, John Momoh (OON), who wanted to do a satire show like The Daily News.
The Open Society Institute West Africa became interested in the project and took on the initial funding with the idea it would become commercially sustainable in the medium to long-term.
“It was quite difficult to get people to back it initially. It’s quite off-the-wall and doesn’t fit with the usual development project scenarios,” McCafferty said. “So, it was through persistence and exchanging documents for 18 months that we got it sorted out.”
The idea was to provide enough outside help to make it happen but not to make it so much that the project required on-going external skills. Pilot Media Initiatives did some preparatory research in Nigeria on skills available, audiences and other issues and recruited some of the staff, particularly writers. It then put a team on the ground for just three weeks.
The set was built in the USA and shipped in but everything else was local.
“We were pulling the team together and getting the set sorted out so we could get cracking from day one. We ran a non-broadcast pilot and were there for episode 1 and somewhat for episode 2.”
After that, they were available to provide phone advice, but the Nigerian team were on their own.
“With comedy and satire, everything’s in the timing. All of that was quite challenging (for a new team). We simplified the concept a bit. So, it was not only a new building and new staff but a brand new concept,” McCafferty added.
“The camera staff were mostly used to shooting news and not shooting where you make creative decisions.”
“Two of the external team who set up the show had no direct experience of Africa but approached it as they would any other piece of commercial work. Pilot Media Initiatives deal with the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that the funders needed.”
“If you do it like that you can turn someone who’s never worked in TV into someone competent very quickly. We wanted to provide the minimum necessary support and offer some follow-up help but then it’s their show. The business model was done with a view to getting sponsors so that it would last after the initial funding.”
In audience terms, it was doing two things for Channels TV. Firstly, it was bringing in people who were not politically engaged or who watched the news: this was extremely helpful as Channels TV is a news channel. Secondly, there was also a female bias in the new audience, again something that was helpful as news watching tends to have a male skew.
“The (female) audience is one that the sponsors actually love. It helps build the commercial sustainability of the programme. It happened because it’s Nigeria and despite the oil price crisis, there was no difficulty selling to sponsors.”
After the first episode aired, McCafferty said he had some worries.
“On the morning after the first show I had this worry: were the police going to come to the hotel for us? But they didn’t and there has never been any pressure on or interference with the show,” he said.
He stresses that it was important to understand where the “red lines” lay in terms of discussions about different issues.
“Local staff and advisers knew where the dangers lay and we met in the middle on many issues. There were no cheap jokes. It’s crafted satire and that probably helped.”
Following the success of The Other News, PMI is interested in talking to other African countries about doing similar but different news satire format shows.
“Each country has its own political dynamics. It helped it was an Anglophone country but we could look outside of that.
“The continent’s also a good place for developing digital programme versions. Something very big is happening across the continent and we’re looking at projects in places like Kenya: “The host/guest format works well and is relatively cheap so all sorts of iterations of the format are possible.”
The Other News is currently on break and would be back in the fourth quarter of the year – October-November.