Thriving in a pressure cooker – Carte Blanche’s Chwayitisa Futshane

It’s a seven-day-a-week job and on the day we sat down to do the interview, Carte Blanche supervising producer Chwayitisa Futshane had been at it for 17 days straight. But, for her, it’s all about making gripping television.

It’s not just a job to her; it’s a passion. She’s an energetic and charismatic person whose larger-than-life personality fills a room. A disarming smile precedes every sentence.

It’s surprising someone whose career is a pressure cooker of stress seems to find time for everyone. Futshane cares about her job, and cares deeply about the people she works with.

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It was her primary school teachers who nicknamed her Nan, a shortened version of her second name Nandisa, because they couldn’t pronounce her first name, she laughed.

Futshane was born in Queenstown, now Komani, in the Eastern Cape but spent most of her formative years in a tiny farming town called Komga, not far from East London. She read media studies and journalism at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.

It was there she met former Carte Blanche producer George Mazarakis, won the M-Net Carte Blanche scholarship and got invited to apply, on completion of her studies, for her first job at the show.

She nailed the interview. Futshane said: “I love broadcasting, and I love the show, and I love how we get to tell extraordinary stories. I’m a narrative-driven person.”

Couple that with a strong visual, cinematic element and this, Futshane said, is how viewers are drawn in and taken on a journey in every story. That is what making irresistible actuality television is all about.

“Maybe we are chasing something or someone, perhaps it’s a story about organised crime, a murder or a positive look at an achievement, or a feel-good story, but the objective remains the same: to partner with our viewers on this journey.”

Carte Blanche has been doing it for 35 years. Futshane started her own narrative at the show a decade ago, as a researcher fresh out of university, ranking up to her current role.

“A supervising producer touches almost every aspect of the show. You work with the various insert producers, scripts, managing show content and the quality of the features, and then there’s ensuring the live show on a Sunday night takes place seamlessly.”

Due to the nature of the programme it is only ready to go minutes before going live. Once in a while, the team spends a weekend in court defending attempted interdicts, protecting the show’s right to tell it all and viewer’s rights to hear about what’s really going on.

Subjects of investigative journalism don’t always like being exposed. Futshane was also the executive producer and producer for Strangers You Know for Combined Artistic Productions, the company which produces Carte Blanche for M-Net.

It is a hard-hitting true crime documentary series that touched her emotionally. She said the extent of what people can do to one another, the violence and the brutality of it, really got to her.

She said: “We had access to old case dockets, graphic pictures and video content of crime scenes. In many cases the footage was taken hours after it had occurred. There were still bodies visible, and the sheer horror the victims must have gone through was very visible.

“I would imagine what these people must have gone through. The fear, the desperation. It was horrific.”

She respects the investigators and prosecutors of these crimes.

“You get an insight into the investigators, what they go through mentally, emotionally, because you’re talking about men and women who themselves are parents, they’ve got children, they’ve also got spouses. This is what they’re exposed to day to day.

“You get to watch big men, big men who can handle big guns fall apart. Fall apart because this was the one case that broke them. This was the case that was so horrific that it changed how they viewed the job that they do.”

When she’s not managing Carte Blanche, Futshane enjoys watching crime series on TV, and she adores Black Panther, which she has watched a few times and which “just blows me away every time”.

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