27 August 2008: Media Statement

BravoBrava is alive and well and living at 1485 Radio Today countrywide on DStv Audio Channel 169. This is the show where everyone is a star and deserves the right to twinkle; where everyone is cheerful, trouble-free and at ease! On this show some are gay, some not so gay and some, not gay at all. This is the radio show where listeners are not separated but where the aim is to integrate, to encourage and to embrace.

Going out on Tuesday nights from 20:00, it is three years since this immensely popular gay radio show hit the airwaves for the first time. Other shows have come and gone but BravoBrava remains South Africa’s only gay radio show broadcast nationally. During this year BravoBrava celebrated its 100th broadcast as well as its 100th celebrity interview!
What is so encouraging is the fact that the show has won at least as many heterosexual listeners as it has inspired vast numbers of gay people. Producer, compiler and presenter Mixael de Kock says that both gay and non-gay listeners phone in from the most obscure places in South Africa to say how much they enjoy the programme.
Be it in the main centers or the rural areas of South Africa it would appear that once people had tuned in to BravoBrava they come back every week.
The main objective of the programme is to integrate rather than to separate. Mixael smiles when he confirms that the many non-gay listeners are proof that BravoBrava has achieved its aims. “If non-gay people listen to a gay programme because it is interesting, informative and entertaining then I have a captive audience to whom I can prove, through intelligent radio, that gay people are worthy contributors to society. And, in the end that is what gay pride is about.
We make provision for in-depth interviews as well as shorter interviews ranging from politics and current affairs through legal, financial as well as fashion and the arts in all of its guises. But, humor is very much the order of the day and, the quirkier the better!”
It is interesting that BravoBrava’s radio cereal called The De Cocqs of Grootvoëlsvlei had, via streaming, won a huge international audience as well. This series with its weekly one-minute disposable episodes is based on the classic Springbok Radio soapie Die Du Plooys van Soetmelksvlei.
This series has been a huge hit with the younger crowd and has led to the planning of an event, the BravoBrava Annual Grootvoël Awards, soon to be announced in Wrapped.