Richard H Nosworthy( left) and Tess
development. I began working on establishing BakGat Radio, an internet radio station. In February 2012 we launched the first and only radio station that plays 100 % South African music, 24 / 7 365 days a year. Can you believe that it’ s never been done before?”
“ When they started, we were told it wasn’ t possible”, but now BakGat Radio has over ten deejays who play every genre imaginable to listeners all over the world. With very little marketing they had over 20 000 listeners in their first year.“ I’ m very excited about the new website we’ ve just launched, and we now have free Apple and Android Apps available for download so you can listen to quality South African music wherever you are.”
No one wants to offend the NFVF
Currently Richard is on the South African Film and Television Awards( SAFTA) committee as the official South African Screen Federation( SASFED) representative, where he is driving the negotiations with the National
Film and Video Foundation( NFVF) to hand over the awards ceremony to an independent academy.
Two years ago, Eddie Mbalo( ex NFVF CEO) announced that they would hand over the SAFTA Awards to an academy over the next three years- which hasn’ t happened. It’ s a politically fraught situation, because nobody wants to offend the NFVF by taking the awards away from them, and understandably the NFVF don’ t want the SAFTAS to fall into the wrong hands either.“ No-one wants to see the newly formed Academy fall through its own ass if it doesn’ t have the correct staff running it or enough funding to keep it on track.”
But according to Richard, a lot of progress has been made in the meantime and hopefully by 2015 an independent Academy will be in place to start the handover
process.“ The biggest challenge at the moment is that everyone wants to know how
the new Academy is going to be funded. For me, that is really the second question; the first question we should be answering is what exactly the academy is going to be and do? How are we going to fund this animal, if we don’ t know what animal it is? When we have agreed what we need to fund, we can start budgeting and looking for funds. Finding the money is the easy part compared to getting the local industry to come together and agree on something as basic as the structure, aims and objectives of the Academy!”
Luckily with WGSA things proceed a little faster and easier. We are proud to announce that Richard has taken on the mammoth task of structuring the inaugural Writers’ Guild Awards, which will be known as the WGSA Muse Awards. Take note, writers: Call for entries opens on 1st August 2013 and will close on 31st October 2013, and the awards will be presented early in 2014.
Watch your favourite magazine for all the details on how to enter the first-ever Muse Awards.
26 | WGSA MAG June 2013