The Sweet Service Award goes to Andrew Cowie of Deukom, who was very efficient in assisting with an upgrade to the Premier Smart Card for the German Bouquet, a process which had been most frustrating to sort out via Multichoice, a company which must have the worst call centre in the country!  Not only did Andrew get the signal sent, but he also followed up telephonically and by e-mail to see if all was working, and helped to get a second smart card set up for the same Deukom subscription.  Andrew helped cut through the ‘Germanness’ and bureaucracy of dealing with Deukom, being British but speaking a good German.

The Sour Service Award goes to ZDF and its screening of a two-part thriller ‘Verschollen am Kap’ (Lost in the Cape) on Monday and yesterday evening.  Clearly based in Cape Town, and filmed in the city centre, the 3-hour movie did not show any beautiful scenes of the city, and would be a major tourism deterrent for Cape Town, the movie implying that the public water supply could be poisoned, that Cape Town only has criminals living there, especially those with darker skin colour, that one can be tortured in Cape Town, that our city is not safe for young people, and that our hospitals are unsafe in that anyone can walk into a ward, dressed as a doctor, and inject a patient with a poison!  One wonders how the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) could have funded this movie, and how permission was given by the City of Cape Town and the Film Commission for filming such a tourism-damaging movie about our city!  The first part of the thriller was seen by close to 4 million ZDF viewers on Monday, on Germany’s third largest TV station.  TOP Productions and Media Film Services were local film companies involved in the production.

The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog.  Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at info@whalecottage.com.   Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales newsletters on the www.whalecottage.com website.