TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Fear Itself with Ernest Dickerson + Wendell Pierce; Radical Radio Soweto

CJSR FM88
www.cjsr.com
6 PM Mountain Time

Beginning in January and finishing in July, Edmonton and the surrounding area hosted the shooting of Fear Itself, an American network summer horror anthology.

Ernest Dickerson, who helmed Juice and Never Die Alone among many features, directed the episode “Something With Bite,” which debuts tomorrow night on NBC. Check your local listings.

I’ve written a feature story on film and television production in Alberta with Fear Itself at the centre for the issue of Unlimited magazine, so check your newsstands in August, and the Bro-Log.

Actor Wendell Pierce, best known as Detective Bunk Moreland on HBO’s The Wire, plays the world’s first veterinarian to become his own patient. I caught up with both gentlemen on and off-set during their shoot at the end of April and the beginning of May.

In the second half of the show, we'll go to South Africa, and a story of democratic success being crushed by corporate power. South Africa today, fourteen years after the democratic revolution, is a far cry from where most of its revolutionaries intended it to be.

The country’s economy is still mostly owned by the European settler minority. Outside of countries in the midst of civil war, South Africa is still the rape capital of the world. The country struggles with an HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Thanks to Thatcherite economics, South Africa has developed a middle class which collaborates with the settler minority, while the majority still live in poverty, for whom electricity itself has become a neoliberal battleground.

Some South Africans realised that broadcasting and creativity could be combined to train South Africans for employment while giving them the means to voice their realities, their frustrations and their solutions.

Their pirate radio concept became a massive success. The government, serving the interests of homogenised corporate radio, answered that massive success with a massive crackdown. We'll go to Pambazuka News for a July 6, 2007 story on radical radio in Soweto.