Danielle Dieffenthaller is a TV person.

As a child she felt such a connection to on-air personalities that she once wrote a feedback letter to the pitchman for Evo Stick glue. At 18 she copped a reporter job at TTT and eventually wormed her way into the production team for Horace James’ No Boundaries. She studied TV and radio at Ryerson University, but was manifestly ’not a radio person’. (’I’d rather say something with a human face or nature,’ she says.) At 24 she and a business partner took out a quarter million dollar loan for a camera. She half-jokes that at the time a house in Trincity could have been bought for that sum.

Our talk takes place in her catch-all living room. We’re surrounded by multinational masks, the odd book and bottle (territorial markings of a preschooler and baby) and the Dollar Man (a framed Express front page featuring her husband in old mas mode). We’re topped by studio-worthy lights, flanked by office equipment. Dieffenthaller tells of both strides and setbacks with melodrama galore and robust, sometimes ironic laughs.

’This can drive you to drink,’ she says with a furrowed brow and chuckle. ’It hasn’t done so yet. But it can.’

Though Dieffenthaller acts as co-writer (along with producer and director) for her projects, one can appreciate why my last couple paragraphs aren’t ones she’d undertake. Why employ quotation marks and adjectives when the eyes and ears of a camera can convey so much more? And why consume a strict diet of canned, imported sitcoms when there are local stories to be told, inner selves to be reflected and a work-in-progress identity to flesh out?

Those were always the cornerstones of Dieffenthaller’s resolve to further the television production work begun by others. But while James, for example, always wrangled with funding, he wasn’t up against the tsunami of American cable channels and the cheap foreign series preferred by the pockets of local television stations.

’TTT had a drama department up and running in those days,’ she remembers. ’It didn’t seem like running against this huge tidal wave of foreign content and disdain yes, disdain for our own. People love to see themselves on TV. But I have watched a whole generation grow up with no sense of self identity. They look at Pimp My Ride and MTV Cribs. That’s where they find some kind of visual for a role model. There’s nothing else for them to latch on to nothing that is us. The only local content you see is someone being carted off to jail or dead in the street. It’s depressing. The people with ideas who want to show us on TV need opportunity and encouragement,’ she submits.

It’s easy to assume that she, of all people, has had opportunity. Westwood Park-her soap opera about two families with plenty money and bacchanal-enjoyed a six season run, local ratings trumped only by the evening news and, lately, a younger, regional audience on Tempo. The first season of her new set-in-Tobago drama series, The Reef, received an investment of TT$1.6 million and was launched with fanfare last year.

But Reef’s second season remains in limbo for the same reason it took more than three years to move Westwood Park from a pilot to the air, a decade ago. TV stations apparently have a hard time justifying the investment when they can buy recycled US episodes for a fraction of the cost. Sales departments haven’t got the vision or verve to get advertisers on board to the requisite degree. And there are still shortfalls in the production budget that wind Dieffenthaller up in debt. The Trinidad and Tobago Film Company is working on it, but we still haven’t got the industry, incentives and investments that would lift TV for us, by us, out of the scrunting realm.

’There is clearly contempt for the public,’ she says. ’I promised I was not going to sound bitter but you don’t have to hire Market Facts and Opinions (MFO) to know that the shows have a following. I think Government should protect a sector that they presumably want to develop as an alternative to oil. There should be some kind of subsidy because I guarantee that 90 per cent of the people doing productions are catching their tails.

Then there is the vast, unfulfilled potential for captivating audiences abroad.

’We try to make the productions of a standard that can stand up outside Trinidad and Tobago and yet we can’t get the investment. You can’t tell me that it’s of a bad quality or that Young and Restless is better,’ she insists. (As proof, Westwood Park has been pirated in Nigeria.)

Dieffenthaller urges that we begin thinking of made-in-TT films and television productions as a commodity with as much potential for overseas consumption as our Carnival model or mineral wealth.

Her first series has had its detractors. There’s been criticism of its technique and its very subject matter. On the one hand, Dieffenthaller was clear that this was a learning experience for all concerned-her, the theatrical actors, the technical staff.

’I consciously did a soap because you have a lot of leeway. I saw people evolve as people and as actors through the experience,’ she says. As for the claim that the storyline wasn’t sufficiently rootsical, Dieffenthaller insists that T&T has many sides.

’Steelband, Calypso and limbo don’t define us as a people. We are many different things and culture is many different things. I embrace all that is us-every last carnival or folklore character. But Westwood Park came at a time when it was important to challenge that cliché of us as drinking, la basse-dwelling people. We also have a glamorous side that has its own troubles. Every location for Westwood Park,’ she stresses, ’was found in Trinidad.’

Her father, stalwart old mas man, Bunny Dieffenthaller, would have probably earned a living off his wit if he could. Dieffenthaller paved the way for her younger brothers (think Kes the Band) to pursue a creative career. And she knows that a ’whole generation’ of young people will be encouraged by the Westwood Parks and Reefs. Her hope for the industry is, in a word, continuity.

’If it’s not economically feasible to do things and if the work is not ongoing, how are we going to learn? The actors, the technicians where are we all going? What we do here is valid and worthy. It is not Hollywood, but it’s us,’ she says. ’It’s Hollywoodbrook’.