40 years of M-Net: Remembering the magic that changed South African television

Forty years ago, South African television looked very different. There were fewer channels, no streaming, no smartphones and no endless menu of entertainment on demand. Then M-Net arrived in October of 1986 — bringing with it a new kind of television experience, and a generation of presenters who became familiar faces in homes across the country.

For those who were there in the early years, the memories are not only of the programmes, but of the excitement surrounding a channel that felt new, ambitious and unlike anything that had come before.

Ashley Hayden joined M-Net around its second birthday and still remembers that feeling clearly.

“There was just something so exciting and glamorous and new about M-Net back in the day,” she says.

At the time, simply having more viewing choice felt revolutionary. Viewers without subscriptions would gather at the homes of friends who owned decoders, while Open Time gave the rest of the country a glimpse of what M-Net had to offer.

“We had a sense of it being something new and something exciting and something important, and we wanted to give it our best,” Hayden recalls.

The continuity presenters themselves became part of that attraction. Seen in viewers’ lounges several times a week, they were more than people introducing programmes.

“People felt like I was a family member because they saw me in their lounge so often,” she says.

Behind that polished image, though, television could be unpredictable. Hayden remembers her first appearance being anything but smooth, while another memory involves sitting backstage sobbing over The Bridges of Madison County, only to compose herself minutes later and brightly introduce the evening movie.

“There really is a thing of the show must go on,” she says. “No matter what’s happening in your world, you have to show up.”

Peter Ndoro remembers that same sense of being part of something extraordinary.

“There was something magical about M-Net,” he says. “Everybody wanted to work at M-Net. Everybody wanted to get a gig at M-Net.”

Ndoro, an accountant by training, was starting his television career and suddenly found himself working alongside the presenters he had previously watched at home.

“You’d watch Doreen Morris and Ashley Hayden and Sue-Ann Brown on TV, and then you walk into the car park and there they are in real life.”

For him, M-Net also became an important training ground.

“You just learnt to be professional, and you learnt to do your best, and that ethos just stayed with me for the rest of my life.”

The scale of appointment television is another memory that stands out. Sunday nights, with Carte Blanche and the movie premiere, were prized shifts. Ndoro also remembers stories of people adjusting their routines to make sure they were home in time for programmes such as Egoli.

“When people thought of M-Net, they were thinking a lot about the people that they saw in their houses every single day,” he says.

Scot Scott remembers an environment where presenters were expected to be ready for almost anything.

In the early years, he says, there were no scriptwriters preparing every word.

“You had to do your own research on the programmes that you were going to present,” he recalls. “There was no autocue as well. Whatever you wanted to say was off the cuff.”

That preparation mattered. On one morning, seconds before going live, his controller realised he had the wrong programme tape and raced across the building to retrieve the correct one.

Scott simply kept talking.

“I was quite prepared,” he says. For several minutes, he drew on research he had done about Clint Eastwood and kept viewers entertained until the tape arrived.

Live television, he says, demanded something very particular.

“You have to be sharp, you have to be fast, you have to be thinking on your feet.”

Three presenters, three very different careers — but a remarkably similar memory of M-Net’s early years.

It was live, occasionally unpredictable and technically far simpler than television today. Yet for the people making it, and the audiences gathering around their screens, it represented something new.

And four decades later, perhaps that is why one word still comes up again and again when they remember it: magic.