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We were doing the show with South African youth station YFM and it has done such a good job getting some of its
audience along. It was so exciting that so many people had turned out, but just moving around was going to be hard. Then as we went on air, out came the cameras. At one stage 7 or 8 people were surrounding me taking snaps as I tried to get across the room. And then the debate took off. Within minutes about half the room had their hands in the air wanting to talk and however hard we tried we couldn’t hear from all of them. And for some that was frustrating. As the programme went on more and more people were poking and pulling me wanting to get their hands on the mic. It’s always difficult in those situations – you want to hear from as many people as possible, but there’s just not time in a hour to hear from everyone.

The passion of the crowd was extraordinary and exhilarating, but also intimidating at times. It felt like the whole room was hanging on every word and each comment would bring a set of people with their hands in the air wanting to have their say.

As the programme went on it became clear that some of the guests were frustrated that we were talking about a number of negative issues in South African society. One man stood up and, looking straight at me, said the media was determined to paint a bad picture of South Africa. All I could say back to him was that that’s not the case amongst our editorial team, and more importantly we only talked about issues that young South Africans had told us they wanted to talk about. I’m not sure he was convinced, but it is true.

One of the challenges of presenting World Have Your Say is deciding when to intervene and when to let a conversation flow. But yesterday I faced a new dilemna - whether to interrupt a conversation to stop a fight breaking out. Xenophobia was the hottest topic of the evening and when one Zimbabwean guest reacted angrily to a comment by a South African I did what I often do and asked them to speak directly to each other. I didn’t realise that they would do so from about a metre apart and with much of the audience beginning to stand up and gather around. It was a nervous moment. People were beginning to shout out opinions when not on mic, these two men were very angry, and it was becoming harder to hear exactly who was on and off mic. In the end, we had to ask everyone just to pause and sit down and fortunately they agreed with me. I’m not sure what would have happened if they hadn’t.

The icing on the cake after all of this is that World Have Your Say and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ have made some great friends at Y FM. Their willingness to stop playing music for an hour (something they’ve never done before) and to promote the show was amazing and we hope we paid back their faith in us. It was a real pleasure to do the show with Y FM presenter Lee and it was great to have her there – the crowd knew her, clearly respected her and when they didn’t listen to me they certainly listened to her!

Right, I’m off for some rest before tonight’s show in Sandton. If it’s anything like yesterday, it could be quite a night.

Ros