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Culture · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — the fifteen-minute Saturday radio slot that launched Yugoslav absurdist comedy

On 9 May 1981 — Victory Day — a group of Sarajevan twenty-year-olds walked into Radio Sarajevo and pretended to seize the microphone. The young editor who had invited them, Boro Kontić, had inherited a fifteen-minute Saturday radio slot called PRIMUS two years earlier. Out of that slot came Top Lista Nadrealista, Zabranjeno Pušenje, Elvis J. Kurtović and His Meteors, and the entire New Primitivism movement. Kontić later said he had a dual role: 'I was someone to help them, someone to develop them, and on the other side I was the first filter.'

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Before the TV sketches, before the cult following, before the prophetic final season, there was a fifteen-minute Saturday radio slot.

The slot was called PRIMUS (Priča i muzika subotom, “Stories and Music on Saturday”) and it aired on Radio Sarajevo’s second programme. The editor who ran it was Boro Kontić, a young journalist who had inherited the show in 1979. As Kontić told Erol Handžar in a 2020 interview for his University of Sarajevo master thesis: “I was an editor who came before, who had been coming since 1979. So I got word that the show existed and I simply reversed it — the name and the idea remained. The show was dedicated to a slightly more alternative view of the world” (Handžar, 2020, p. 103).

9 May 1981

The first primusovci (the first PRIMUS regulars) were Zenit Đozić, Goran Petranović (Rizo) from the band Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors, Zlatan Arslanagić (Zlaja), Saša Kontić (who had earlier co-led a band called Ozbiljno pitanje), and eventually Roki and Nenad Janković (Handžar, 2020, p. 57).

They were, by the account in Janković’s memoir Fajront u Sarajevu, a young group who were shy at first and without a plan. “They wanted to make a first episode where they would enter the studio pretending to be actors, seize the microphone, and demand changes”, trying, in the process, to attract the attention of a Sarajevo public that was sleeping at the hour the show aired (Janković, 2014, p. 94, cited in Handžar, 2020, p. 57).

The first episode of PRIMUS aired on 9 May 1981, the Day of Victory over Fascism and Europe Day. What followed became history.

How it worked

The format was simple. Two rival “factions” (Kemina raja and Haretova raja) competed within each episode. The episodes opened with a hymn: “Evo mene, evo mene i zovem se Kemo, evo mene i zovem se Kemo, ima l’ koga da bi ga izlemo, da bi ga izlem’o” (Handžar, 2020, p. 57). After the hymns, the factions took turns with sketches and songs, using Sarajevan street slang (belaj, raja, čaršija) that made a deliberate move toward the city’s local audience.

They also invented “ekonomsko-propagandne poruke” (EPP) — mock advertisements for imaginary businesses. One of the more memorable: “If you are a poetic soul and wish to kill yourself, and you have that breath that you’re alive, healthy and happy — shoot! Majakovski brand pistols. Sanski Most” (Handžar, 2020, p. 58).

The dual role

Kontić was both enabler and gatekeeper. He told Handžar: “I probably influenced them a lot. First they had to tell me what they want to say. Let’s see what they’ve imagined. I had a dual role. I was someone to help them, someone to develop them, and on the other side I was the first filter” (Handžar, 2020, p. 104).

He also described how, when reviewing material, his own editor (who outranked him) would sometimes start coughing and clearing his throat at a point in a sketch where an odd sentence appeared: “and he would do everything to ‘push through’ what those creative lads wanted to get on air” (Handžar, 2020, p. 104).

What came out of fifteen minutes

Out of a single fifteen-minute Saturday radio slot on Radio Sarajevo’s second programme came:

  • Top Lista Nadrealista — three TV seasons (1984, 1988, 1991), 81 episodes, one of the most-cited satirical programmes in Yugoslav television history.
  • Zabranjeno Pušenje — the band named because Janković’s mother told the lads in the basement on Fuad Midžić street to stop smoking (Handžar, 2020, p. 53). Eleven albums by 1991.
  • Elvis J. Kurtović & His Meteors — three albums and two compilations. The stage name came from a neighbour’s boy called Elvis, named after Presley, who died the year the rock star did (Handžar, 2020, p. 53).
  • The New Primitivism movement — the Sarajevo-born subcultural wave that Nenad Janković, in interview, described as “rock with the added spirit of Baščaršija, which in its cohesion gave it one distinct, unique, and striking note” (Handžar, 2020, p. 53).

Kontić went on to become director of Mediacentar Sarajevo, one of the most respected independent media organisations in Bosnia. He told Handžar that satire is “that indispensable component of social life without which a person would not have the necessary distance from things. We live in a time in which everything tries to make you believe what it says” (Handžar, 2020, p. 104).

The fifteen-minute Saturday radio slot was where that distance began.

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