History
History
It all started many years ago when Thierry Cassuto and Zapiro decided to produce their first puppet, which undoubtedly had to be of our iconic former president Nelson Mandela. After much trial and error, Madiba was born and a two-minute clip was produced, guest-starring footage of puppets from Spitting Image and Les Guignols. Jeffrey Fineberg, from the original Spitting Image team, helped with the complex latex process and SA puppet specialist Gary Friedman gave a hand (or two) to handle the puppet. Jonni Cohen directed the clip. We see it now as a rather clumsy effort but we did it all with our own personal money and everybody learned a great deal.
When Mandela left the Presidency in 1999, Zapiro was invited to the official garden-party that was given in his honour at Fernwood Estate in Cape Town. He managed to sneak the puppet in to the strictly VIP party, much to the horror of Mandela’s bodyguards. But the puppet elicited laughs from all parliamentarians and ministers in attendance. As Zapiro came close to the great man he stretched the puppet’s hand towards him. Without hesitation Mandela shook hands and said: “Oh, I believe I have met this gentleman before!”
A few weeks later, we discovered to our dismay that the Madiba puppet had been stolen from the workshop. We just could not believe that someone could have done such a terrible thing, let alone why. Then exactly ten years later someone from our team spotted the tiny face of Madiba in a photograph of a workshop specialising in mostly gore-ish creatures for feature films in the Johannesburg suburbs. A few weeks later, with the help of friends from the Nelson Mandela Foundation, wearing dark glasses and our most intimidating faces (we were actually quite scared as we didn’t know who were going to meet there), we raided the place and finally recovered the head of Nelson Mandela.
In 2007, we decided to approach both Etv and the SABC again and, much to our surprise, some brave programme executives from the SABC thought it was time for South Africans to a good laugh at themselves and managed to get their management to commission a full TV pilot from us. Unfortunately, that is as far as it went. Even though ZANEWS seem poised to become a success, it was veto-ed by the board (and a mysterious invisible hand) and sent back to obscurity.
But, in 2009, Kulula and the Mail & Guardian decided that it was about time South Africa was given a chance to discover ZANEWS and sponsored its first full season, raising the show out of the abyss and into the hearts and minds of South Africa.
We’re into our fourth seasons and are still going strong. The videos still push boundaries, are important and hilarious. We continue to win over legions of fans and critics and turn out smashing episodes, because here we can, and we did – and we will continue.
