The emergency anchor man

This tragic incident occurred in the Eighties live on the SABC’s TV1. It was the 8pm news and the newsreader, either Michael de Morgan or John Bishop, had called in sick. In a mad scramble to find someone to read the news with less than an hour to spare, the producers settled on an unassuming man by the name of Eben Engelbrecht. Arriving for work that night, the last thing he would have been assuming is that he would be reading the main English news — within minutes!

Engelbrecht was a sound technician, and the producers probably thought he was a safe choice, close to the action, had seen this thing before. A suit and tie was flung on him, his hair was brushed and there he was in the hot seat, facing the countdown.

I don’t know at what point everyone else started realising that something was busy going wrong, but Engelbrecht must have known fairly early on.

After a shaky start of predictable nervousness on the poor man’s part, in which he stuttered and squinted into the camera like a trapped antelope, the bulletin soon developed into a situation in which the next news story was already being displayed behind him on the wall, while he was still struggling, really struggling, to make it through the previous story. His eyes were clearly uncomfortable as they tried to follow the slowly sliding news bar from which he was supposed to be reading.

Compounding his agony was the obvious panic going on in his ear plugs. Instructions from more than one voice must have been piling in at an awful rate as the panic set in among the producers.

Engelbrecht was soon basically just trying to stay afloat, abandoning the screen-reading altogether and clutching a pile of loose pages, trying to read the day’s stories from that instead.

Oblivious to everyone at that point, including the millions of viewers watching the news, was the reason why Engelbrecht was having such difficulty keeping up with the news meter on the screen. In fact, had the producers known this about him, they would never have chosen him as the emergency anchor man in the first place.

You see, he was short-sighted.

This explained why he had chosen a career as a sound technician. Now, live on air, with millions of people watching him, he was having to navigate news stories that were running away from him, getting stuck in a pit of half-completed stories, a pit getting deeper and deeper by the second. His news pages were now completely in the wrong order too. The news picture behind him was going backwards and forwards, trying to find him, getting back into sync, but sometimes as far as four stories ahead of him. It was a comedy of brutal errors and there was still plenty of time left on the clock.

I don’t remember if that poor man ever made it to the sports stories for the day, because I was but a boy when this tragic incident unfolded in front of me. But I do remember his last words just prior to the bulletin coming to a merciful close. He was stuck mid-story, as he had been for most of the bulletin, trying to find the right page, the right story, when suddenly he halted and looked up, gazing off-camera, waiting. Long seconds of complete silence hung in the air as something was communicated to him in his headphones.

He put down the papers with a painful dignity and said: “I believe this is the end of the news …”