Millions of South Africans and others around the world are still digesting the news of the loss of the media industry giant, Derek Watts.
Watts was diagnosed with skin cancer a few months ago and after struggling to recover, he had stepped down as anchor from the hugely popular investigative TV show, “Carte Blanche”.
He died on Tuesday, August 22.
His former “partner in crime-busting”, Devi Sankaree Govender, who worked with Watts for numerous years, shared her sentiments on a recent radio interview of the kind of person he was on and off screen.
Speaking on East Coast Breakfast with Darren, Sky and Carmen, she said: “Derek was the same person on and off screen, which is quite a unique quality to have on television because you find that a lot of people want to project a whole other kind of imagine and the moment the cameras are switched off, well then they are just somebody else.
“He was easy going, fun, he never stood on ceremony. When I started on ‘Carte Blanche’ all those years ago, when he was the senior, I grew up watching him. He made me feel so comfortable. He was so encouraging.”
She added he was very excited when she arrived on the show because he didn’t like “doing confrontations”.
“He was also quite excited because I loved doing confrontations and he never liked doing it because Derek was a genuinely nice man, so I am quite gutted.
“We knew he wasn’t well, but I think it is different when you get that phone call.”
Sharing one thing that she had learnt from Watts during her years working with him, she spoke of how he taught her to be graceful under pressure.
“Whatever difficult situation he was in, he still managed to always keep calm, which is not an easy thing to do especially in our kind of environment… Somebody wants to klap you basically, they not happy, you’re closing down their business.
“The entire concept of staying calm but still getting the job done, because you still have to ask the questions.”
Speaking about the impact Watts made on the media landscape in South Africa, Govender said: “Remember ‘Carte Blanche’ started in 1988, this was in the middle of the bad, dark days of apartheid and I grew up in Umzinto on the South Coast, I’ve never seen this thing called investigative television in journalism and there I am watching the first episode of ‘Carte Blanche’, almost to the date, 35 years ago and something resonated with me.
“So people like Derek, Ruda Landman, Manu Padayachee are the presenters and investigative journalists at the time who showed the rest of South Africa what investigative journalism was supposed to look like, because we had no clue…
“Derek set the bar on how it should be done, that’s the kind of impact and legacy that he will definitely leave, without a doubt. He is an OG guys. There’s nobody else, it’s him.”
Details on Watts’s funeral have yet to be confirmed.