SABC3's got major witching hour problems going on in the early hours of the mornings.
The horror hits the hardest from 2am.
There's no regular show at the time. Instead it's a twilight zone that includes randomly selected episodes of re-re-re-
rebroadcasts of old series on unspecified days.
First there was a haphazard rebroadcast of the Afrikaans series Sterk Skemer and now there's a rebroadcast of Zero Tolerance that's being aired in a total mess.
It
isn't broadcast daily and there's
no way of telling when it's going to air.
It aired on a Tuesday when it premiered, the next week it aired on a Thursday and Friday and this week it's airing on Monday and Friday. There are no proper scheduled days for it so it's impossible to tell when the next episode will be on. There isn't even a vague pattern so it's also impossible to guess. The same thing happened with Sterk Skemer.
Clearly they're just slapping on any series they have archived as a filler to avoid dead time. They're treating us as if no-one stays up when there are loads of people who need late night programming - night shift workers, insomniacs, new parents, students, party goers who get home late, the list goes on.
There are so many cool and simple things they could do for night owls that wouldn't cost a fortune. They could buy a feed of an international news channel such as CNN or Al Jaziera or BBC World.
Or they could buy a show from a news feed and have it on nightly e.g. Piers Morgan or Inside Africa from CNN.
Alternatively
earthTV would perfect too - the channel that captures moments of the day, from cameras placed round the world, recording moments in real time.
Or - grooviest option - SABC3 could rig up a couple of webcams of their own in various interesting places and rotate through footage from the day.
There needs to be
something because the way things currently are the screen may as well be blank.