Gareth Cliff promises brave new future for radio

Gender activists, fat people, religious observers, the ANC Youth League, ministerial spokespeople, Helen Zille and fans of Kim Kardashian must all have breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced that their mornings would no longer begin by being taken to task by 5fm shock jock Gareth Cliff.

Cliff and his production team announced that after a decade working for the station, including seven years as the anchor of its morning show, the blond, clench-jawed Pretorian would be embarking on an undisclosed new adventure.

For his millions of loyal listeners and his 629000 Twitter followers, you would think it was the end of the world, judging by the messages of shock and disappointment that flooded the internet in the wake of the announcement.

Sitting in the Sandton offices of his business partner and manager, Rina Broomberg, Cliff insisted that it was simply time to move on.

In a decade in which he has been accused of everything from racism (against both blacks and whites), misogyny, disrespect for those in office, Jesus, Mohammed and those who are no longer alive, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa's most regular defendant thinks he has managed to get away with this much anti-authoritarian mudslinging while working for an SABC radio station perhaps "because the board weren't listening or the politicians weren't listening".

Although he described his exit as "amicable", he acknowledged that "it hasn't always been easy and it hasn't always been pleasant. Management kept on saying to me for years: 'Aw, we have to defend you. We work so hard to keep you out of trouble.' Well, that's your job. What do you want? A certificate of merit?"

If you want to blame anyone for Cliff, perhaps the best culprit is democracy and its most treasured asset, freedom of speech - the right he firmly believes in because "once the genie of freedom of speech is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in. The flow of information, no matter what bills they promulgate, will never be controlled by governments anywhere in the world again. Long live WikiLeaks, long live Thuli Madonsela, long live people who speak their mind, and long live the public and social media platforms that allow people to engage en masse and insult the hell out of each other if they decide to do so."

A lack of self-belief is certainly not something he suffers from, and with his new project he is looking to reinvent the way South Africans think about broadcasting.

Although he has had a highly successful career on radio, he is pessimistic about the state of the medium, which he thinks has become too commercialised. "People talk about content, but if you distilled 5fm down to two hours, you'd find station IDs, DJs saying their own name or saying nothing interesting to callers and going 'Thanks for your opinion'.

"You'd probably be left with about 10 minutes of real content, most of which, at this point, would consist of [DJ] Fresh's laugh ... but nobody has to be captive to this dull, unimaginative world that FM radio's become."

So is his decision to leave a case of wanting to remove himself from being part of the problem? Partly, perhaps, and partly because he believes in Professor Jonathan Jansen's adage that "if you do the same thing for seven years, you lack imagination".

Then there is the (to Cliff's mind) tired and deathly example of others in the industry who have been on the radio so long that no one can remember a time when the medium existed without them.

"What's the option for me? Either I invent the future or I become like poor old Alex Jay, who's a lovely chap and who was a legend in his time but now has a show on some AC station, slowly withering away. Or Barney Simon, who used to say he 'would never play commercial music, I'll only play rock' and now he's playing f***ing Roxette on Jacaranda for a pay cheque. Do me a favour."

He and Broomberg are holding their cards close to their chest in terms of details of their new enterprise. All they will say is that D-day is May 1 .

He said his new endeavour was the result of his and Broomberg's determination to "think bigger".

"[We've] been thinking for a long, long time about how we can deliver more to the audience and give them the really juicy stuff. Imagine, if you will, a picture of a naked woman where everything is censored except the juicy bits - that's what people want ...

"It's going to be a lot of things. There really isn't anything like it. Something that's politically incorrect, something that's unhinged, something that's unruly, something that breaks all the boundaries down and something that's not patronising ... [making it] possible for broadcasters to unshackle themselves from the SABCs, the Kagisos and Primedia and give the opportunity for people to say: 'Well, actually, if you're going to fire me, f**k you. I'll go there.'"

Cliff-hangers ... 

Gareth Cliff on fat people: He constantly referred to singer Adele as fat and cued a recording of a snorting pig whenever he played one of her songs

On the Kardashians: after Kim Kardashian's appearance on the cover of Vogue with her husband, Kanye West, earlier this year, Cliff tweeted "@kimkardashian a victory for sex workers everywhere".

In 2009, after the death of former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, Cliff posted on Twitter: "Manto is dead. Good. A selfish and wicked bungler of the lowest order. Rotten attitude and rancid livers - all three of them." A furore broke out across social media and in the newspapers and the ANC demanded an apology.

In 2010, Cliff penned an open letter to the government, referring to President Jacob Zuma's "bastard children" and calling Minister for Higher Education Blade Nzimande ugly. The letter caused huge public debate and Cliff was invited to have lunch with Zuma's spokesman, Zizi Kodwa.

In 2012, Cliff was cleared after referring to a caller as "Dear Bitch" on air in an effort to get her to call back after hanging up.

In 2011, while interviewing gender activist Angela Larkin, Cliff remarked that most 22-year-olds were more interested in lying with their legs open than doing good for society. Outrage and many opinion columns followed. Cliff wrote a letter denying allegations of sexism.

In 2012 ,the Broadcasting Complaints Commission received a complaint against Cliff after a broadcast in which he said: "There is nothing good in Afghanistan, nor is there anyone with any common sense. Westerners should leave these 13th-century barbarians to blow themselves up."

The complaint was dismissed.