Talk Show Host
Kate Turkington started her broadcasting career with the BBC in Northern Ireland at the BBC World Service. She subsequently hosted two live BBC TV shows – Late with Kate – a current affairs talkshow, where she interviewed politicians, a prime minister or two, and newsmakers. This was followed by a prime time Saturday night BBC TV live talkshow – Kate at 8 – where guests included the best of the 60s celebs – The Beatles, Mary Quant, Harry Worth, Freddie and the Dreamers, Anthony Hopkins, Clement Freud – to name but a few – and lots of comedians, singers and groups, and once a talking dog.
While lecturing in the English Department and heading up the Television Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, she regularly freelanced on SABC TV, memorably Prime Time in the 80s, and numerous educational series like Crossroads, which she wrote, directed and often presented.
Kate Turkington’s Believe It Or Not (7-10pm), a very popular 702/Cape Talk live three-hour Sunday night talkshow, offers a non-denominational but multi-dimensional approach to philosophical, moral and religious topics and issues drawn from our daily lives. The programme, South Africa’s longest-running live radio talkshow with the original host in the same time slot, has been running for almost 17 years.
With her extensive travel and intercultural experience, Kate comments on and facilitates lively discussions surrounding values, beliefs and ethics. Guests have included Richard Dawkins, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Deepak Chopra, Stephen Jay Gould, Karen Armstrong, Goldie Hawn, Professor Desmond Morris, Professor Philip Tobias, rabbis, priests, imams, swamis, new age gurus, philosophers, radical and conservative thinkers, saints, sinners, prophets, seers, psychics, spiritual conmen (and women) and hundreds of authors.
The show is subtitled “The Way You Choose to Live Your Life” and 702 Talk Radio station manager, Pheladi Gwangwa, says the success of the show (which has a wide local and international following) lies in its wide listener appeal. “The show never dictates to listeners, it never judges and never separates right from wrong, but rather provides information on how better to understand people and their beliefs.”
RECENTLY…
Among many other guests, in 2008 she interviewed Princess Irene of the Netherlands about her conservation project in South Africa’s Karoo desert, Lord Jeffrey Archer about his latest book – a radical departure from his thrillers -The Gospel according to Judas Iscariot, Dr Denis Alexander of Cambridge University’s Faraday Institute about the Role of Religion in Scientific Creativity. In June and July, she talked to Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda in Miami, who believes he is the risen Messiah, investigated Chicago’s black Jewish community, talked to three people in Arizona who believe they are physically immortal, and interviewed Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent Tim Butcher about his riveting book Blood River, in which he describes his 3,000km journey down the Congo River, following in the footsteps of the Victorian explorer, Henry Morton Stanley – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ She also looked at the origins of traditional African religion and the role of the early Christian missionaries with Dr Agrippa Goodman Khatide, an ordained minister of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa.
This year, among numerous other topics, she has interviewed UK media celebrity Professor Tudor Parfitt about his claim to have discovered The Lost Ark of the Covenant in Zimbabwe; talked to Egypt’s antiquities supremo, Dr Zahi Hawass, about some recently discovered new tombs and mummies; found out why our minds distort and deceive from author Dr Cordelia Fine; heard about our innate intuitive powers from US spiritual guru, Sonia Choquette; investigated the potential harm of positive thinking and talked to a Zulu lesbian sangoma about her life and that of her lesbian sangoma colleagues. Keep listening!