It was in early June 1964 that the head of United Press International Newsfilm Television in South Africa was summoned by the then SABC director general and asked if he would train a soon-to-be-formed SABC TV news crew.
At that stage, news agency UPI supplied SABC radio with a newswire service and in fact in those days many of the news bulletins were written by UPI and not SABC staff. Ironic that at the height of apartheid, SABC news was being produced by the Americans.
Getting back to that momentous day in 1964, when asked if the training of a TV news crew meant that South Africa would soon be getting TV, the director general responded quite openly and adamantly that as the Government still considered television to the be an "instrument of the devil", there was absolutely no chance of a TV service starting up in this country.
The reason SABC wanted to get involved was purely and simply financial on one hand - there were a lot of TV news freelancers wandering around South Africa shooting footage for the then almost 400 television stations worldwide.
On the other, Government clearly wanted to try and control at least some of the TV news content leaving the country.
One of the first assignments this fledgling SABC TV news crew had was to cover the visit to South Africa by US Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel.
The idea was that the crew should follow Kennedy from Johannesburg to Cape Town, Durban and back to Johannesburg again.
Unfortunately, while they had become technically adept at using the 100kg Auricon camera and sound gear, they hadn't had any experience at just how much stamina it takes to follow a four-day cross country story and bailed out of things after the first day.
This unit formed what was twelve years later to become the SABC TV News department.
In those early days those first SABC TV news crews found it extremely difficult to be objective about what they were covering and more than just tended to slant things the way they assumed their political master would wish.
Frankly, I don't think much has changed.
