Musician-turned-talk-show-host Karen Zoid has landed a double season renewal for her talk show Republiek van Zoid Afrika.
The show debuted on kykNET in July this year and features a mix of chat show, sketch show and musical collaborations. The season ended this month and kykNET has renewed it for two more seasons.
The secret to it's success? TVSA caught up with Karen at the
M-Net Upfronts on Wednesday and asked her. Here's what she had to say:
The whole idea behind it was I'm not a talk show host but a musician and I happen to know a lot of people in South Africa. The problem when you're a public person is that you get a synthetic public persona and people don't know who you are.
Someone like Devi Govender was on the show - most people see her as so serious and an investigative journalist but she's a very, very funny girl. She's like a one-liner machine and she doesn't take life seriously so the show shows the person. It's because of how it was shot and also, I know most of the people.
It's a bit safer because I'm in the same situation. I knew when someone didn't want to talk about their divorce or something crap that happened with SARS - the conversations are about who are they are?
We didn't necessarily just talk about their careers. Quite a big part of the show is comedic sketches and they were quite popular on YouTube - the nice thing is they include some of the celebrities in the sketches.
Season 2 will start filming in April for a winter premiere and guests on the show's wish list include Alex Jay, Nataniël, Patricia Lewis and
Thuli Madonsela.