But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  Still, I suppose there is something in all of us that responds to the tack and cheese of even the most downmarket vaganza. Who could fail to be thrilled by the musical number featuring the dancing security policemen and their borzoi dogs? Who could stop themselves cheering whenever the camera-on-a-crane panned over the conductor’s bald spot as he exhorted the National Symphony Orchestra to ever greater heights of musical excellence? (Seventeen times, if my figures are correct.) Ah, the footlights, the greasepaint, the tears and the tiaras … there is not much that even the most subversive TV producer could do to take the shine from the sequins of a Miss South Africa contest.

  Glued to our sets for Diana’s match and dispatch

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 7 SEPTEMBER 1997

  THE LAST THING the world needs right now is more column centimetres about Diana. The international media have this past week worked themselves into a frenzy over her death, like piranha trying to cram in a final mouthful of flesh from one of the 20th century’s great cash cows. Still, this is a television column, and this week television was all about Diana.

  As far as I can work out, Diana’s achievement is unique. She is responsible for not one, but two of the West’s great “what-were-you-doing-when?” moments. Strangely, I was watching television on both occasions.

  When I was 10, my Standard 3 teacher brought her Sony Trinitron television set to the classroom and we all gathered round to watch the royal wedding. Though a welcome break from long division and the reproductive cycle of the frog, it was a dull affair, made still more so when the visuals froze so Equity could block out Dame Kiri te Kanawa’s singing. The ceremony had little to offer besides a germ of sexual hope in the breast of every little boy with knobbly knees and sticky-outy ears – a flicker of faith that the future might yet provide us with our very own princess. It was all a bit of a fairytale, really, but on that day, Charles was truly our king.

  So as entertainment it was a bit of a dud, but we stuck with it to the bitter end. There were two reasons for such tenacity: firstly, a romantic determination to see the whole schpiel consummated with a kiss; secondly, the overwhelming sense of global connectedness.

  The kiss, frankly, was a disappointment. It was dutiful and passionless and applied like local anaesthetic, and many a keenly watching 10-year-old might have had the first inkling of the depressing gap between fairytale and real life. But the power of sharing a moment with an audience of millions remains undiluted.

  That is one of the uncomfortable seductions of Diana’s death: watching CNN or BBC News on Sunday morning, each of us could join in a worldwide experience that briefly erased our individual and our national specificity. That illusion of connectedness is fleeting and invariably deceitful, but it is one of the truly modern thrills and often guilty pleasures of our age.

  When it came to the actual coverage, there wasn’t much to choose between CNN and the BBC. Both were thorough and professional, and both were quick to put together packages of highlights of the princess’s life, which they recycled over and over throughout the day.

  As befits responsible media organs, both took care to frown upon the paparazzi for their thoughtlessness and insensitivity. It also took them both more than 24 hours before they thought to mention the names of the driver who was killed and the bodyguard who was injured in the crash. It’s a small thing, I know, but it might have meant something to the friends and families of the two men. It might have added a touch of humanity to all the newsworthiness.

  Something else that’s newsworthy is our very own truth commission. Not only does it command regular media coverage, but it also appears to be stimulating a peculiar form of tourism. Focus Features (SABC3, Monday, 10pm) was devoted to the visit of Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean playwright and poet. I had known Dorfman only through his ponderous and somewhat turgid play, Death and the Maiden. After Monday night, I now also know him through his ponderous and extremely turgid poetry.

  The documentary opened with the bizarre sight of Dorfman creeping through the veld after a giraffe, singing what appeared to be an atonal Chilean drinking song. Soon he left the giraffe behind and turned his attention to the city. Even sooner, I started missing the giraffe. Dorfman, we discovered, was in South Africa largely to lurk around the truth commission hearings and to share his feelings on the matter with the people of South Africa. He wasn’t shy to do so.

  I am always reluctant to blame individuals for the impression they convey in carefully edited documentaries, but if Dorfman isn’t a pompous, self-important bore in real life, then the makers of Focus Features were extremely cunning in making him appear so. It’s bad enough that we were forced to welcome into our homes verse that included lines like: “If you could take one word with you to the future/What is it to be?” But, under the banner of intellectual cross-pollination, we were further treated to the sight of Dorfman in a humorously pink shirt, wandering from place to place explaining to locals exactly what was going on in their country. I found myself in the weird position of wishing he would read more poetry.

  The lowest point of the show was Dorfman in the District Six museum, explaining to us – us! – at great length what District Six was and why it was bulldozed. I could perhaps have overcome my irritation if the man had shown any signs of clear historical thinking, rather than lapsing into statements like: “The tragedy of District Six was that 20 years later, there was a place called Sarajevo, and something very similar happened.”

  Sarajevo and District Six? Similar? I have heard Martin Locke make more sense than that. Not satisfied, Dorfman popped up again on Robben Island, pronouncing that: “Robben Island is a distillation, a concentration, an essence of what South Africa was.”

  Oh really, Ariel? What makes you say that? The penguins? The lime quarries? The communal backgammon board? Gah.

  But such quibbles were beside the point. The poet was speaking (in an American accent) and we were expected to listen. I don’t mean to sound parochial here, but if we really needed some ill-informed, self-impressed versifier to talk a bushel of patronising nonsense to the camera in exchange for a free holiday, we didn’t need to bring one all the way from Chile. Surely we have enough muttonheads of our own.

  • Hot Medium’s Chilean Poet Award for the worst piece of television goes to the new advert for Always sanitary pads. It features a personal testimony from a satisfied customer, concluding with the words: “I tried it, I like it, now I’m sticking to it.” Which surely begs the question: Then aren’t you wearing it the wrong way round?

  Mother Teresa should have been blonde

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 14 SEPTEMBER 1997

  GOD BLESS MARTIN LOCKE. I can always rely on him to restore my perspective and preserve my sanity.

  In this past week leading to the announcement of the Olympic bid result, I must confess I temporarily lost my head. Won over perhaps by the patriotic charm of a thousand Pick ’n Pay and Nedbank adverts, I allowed my previously unshakeable indifference to the fate of the games to be, well, shaken. Like a mugging victim who has fallen into the Randburg Waterfront and imagines he is being swept down-river toward the sea, I allowed myself to be caught up in the momentum and rainbow-coloured razzmatazz of the big day.

  So it was that I settled down to watch the big occasion with growing nervous anticipation. I had all the usual Big Match symptoms: racing heart, dry mouth, a craving for harmful substances. I cared. I cared immensely. Then on came Martin Locke.

  Martin is my perpetual reality check. Always obey Hot Medium’s basic rule of thumb: if Martin Locke is excited about something, it is not very important in the greater scheme of things. As soon as I remembered that, and as soon as Martin uttered the words, “Welcome to this glorious city of Cape Town. The heat is on, as the famous song says!”, I knew I was going to be all right.

  Martin Locke is one of nature’s great survivors. Reincarnated countless times as a DJ, a magazine show host, a wannabe jockey and now, most amusingly of all, a sports presenter, Martin has outlasted his way into our he
arts. His boyish enthusiasm is more vigorous by the day, his verbal buffoonery grows ever more endearing. No one can inject gravitas into his voice after a South African defeat like Martin can. David Dimbleby last week describing the procession of Princess Diana’s funeral cortège came across like Jerry Seinfeld by comparison.

  This is Martin’s great gift. He makes us laugh, he makes us cry, he makes us resolve to wear skin protection when going out in the sun. More humble than Trevor Quirk, smoother shaven than Max du Preez, taller than Baby Jake Matlala, Martin is a TV man for all seasons. Love him, hate him, it’s no fun ignoring him.

  Sadly, however, I couldn’t enjoy Martin as much as usual last weekend. Small, wizened, deeply tanned and difficult to understand, Martin has always somehow reminded me of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

  Mother Teresa’s sad death offers an object lesson in the politics of popular culture. Television viewers would have searched the channels in vain for the same elaborate memorials and life assessments that marked Diana’s passing. People can obviously mourn whomever they choose, but it gave pause to notice how Diana’s death was trumpeted as the passing of a great humanitarian, whereas Mother Teresa instantly became not much more than a historical footnote.

  I was never necessarily the Mother’s greatest fan: I found her views on condoms and birth control somewhat perplexing given the sprawling mass of suppurating overpopulation in which she lived and worked. Still, if anyone deserves to be deeply mourned as a self-sacrificing force for good in the world, it is surely her.

  The problem, of course, is that she wasn’t young, blonde and sexually active. What emotional problems she may have had, she kept to herself. I doubt she had a bulimic moment in her life. Mother Teresa did not live a soap opera, and the television cameras didn’t encourage an artificial intimacy with her. She didn’t have the same problems as us, so how could we hope to identify with her? Why should we even try?

  How about this for the perverse power of the popular media: the vast majority of common people around the Western world imagine they had more in common with the noble-born Princess of Wales than Mother Teresa, the champion of the poor. I call it the soapiefication of society.

  Noot vir Noot – game show of the Galapagos

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 23 NOVEMBER 1997

  PERHAPS THIS IS a classic case of cultural bias, but I find Noot vir Noot (SABC2, Saturday, 6pm) inexplicable.

  Being a responsible TV critic, I feel it is my duty to make sense of what is, to me, a truly baffling cultural phenomenon, but time and again I am defeated. It nags at me, that show, it torments me with my own inadequacies. I can never rest for knowing that another episode is out there, oblivious to me, smug and self-sufficient in its indecipherability. It will not yield. I am an urban Ahab, and Johan Stemmet is my Moby Dick.

  The biggest problem is knowing which analytical tools to bring to bear on the beast. Sociological? Anthropological? Psychological? Each week I tune in, notebook in hand, volumes of Freud and Lévi-Strauss opened to relevant pages, trying to draw a bead on my target. Each week it snorts and shimmies out of range with the glimmer of a sequinned waistcoat and the reverb of an electronic synthesiser.

  The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Darwin would have the answer. Watching an episode of Noot vir Noot is like watching footage of a National Geographic expedition to the Galapagos Islands. It’s a strange and fascinating world, populated by bizarre creatures with weird skills and survival techniques.

  The Galapagos archipelago was so valuable to Darwin because, pristine in its isolation, it offered him an opportunity to study the effects of natural selection and environmental adaptation in a more or less closed system, undisturbed by outside influences or competition. Of course the Galapagos spawned some odd critters, but few more foreign than those I see every Saturday night.

  For those without scientific curiosity, who haven’t experienced the fearful fascination of Noot vir Noot at first hand, it is a game show of sorts, in which a variety of guests identify snatches of tunes presented by Johan Stemmet and his in-house band, the Musiek Fabriek. Ah, but so bland a description can’t begin to convey the sense of dislocation that accompanies watching the show. The (English-speaking) viewer becomes a stranger in a strange land, bereft of recognisable cultural cues or points of familiarity.

  Consider the Musiek Fabriek, in their variegated plumage of pink, purple and sunset-orange, and wonder at the environment that would have encouraged such perverse evolutionary adaptation. But more than this, more than the hairstyles and white canvas belts and unearthly moustaches, consider their principal means of communication. Consider the music.

  Who makes that music? Where does it come from? Why does every episode of Noot vir Noot remind me of Valentine’s Day in some infernal, interminable Kardies of the mind? Is it just me, or is that music the aural equivalent of a bunch of carnations, a red inflatable heart at the end of a stick, one of those small fluffy teddy bears holding a sign saying, “I love you beary much”? Most astonishingly, what extrasensory affinity do the contestants have with this music?

  Because each of these individuals possesses an arcane knowledge so esoteric, so abstruse, that it leaves me dumbstruck, humbled by the rich diversity of nature. They listen to a note (no kidding – one note) banged out on the synthesiser, and are able to identify “Ek verlang na jou” by Gé Korsten, or “My liefde is soos a warm hasie” by Carike Keuzenkamp. These are preternatural skills. Like the greater blue-gilled Galapagan iguana, these people make use of instincts and abilities that are no longer available to their distant, mainland relatives. This is a case of evolution taking the road less travelled.

  Noot vir Noot is a time capsule of a particular cultural strand or species of Afrikanerdom. It is endlessly intriguing, inexplicably entertaining, and to an outsider, hopelessly impenetrable. Like the Galapagos, it should be preserved intact, not only for the contribution it makes to our cultural biodiversity, but as rich research material for the naturalists and cultural anthropologists of the future.

  That’s no duck, that’s Ally McVeal

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 28 JUNE 1998

  SHOULD THE SPOOKY day come that I accidentally receive a transfusion of blood from Felicia, and find myself suddenly taking seriously Oprah’s suggestion that we all keep Gratitude Diaries, my first entry will be: I am very grateful that I don’t know anyone who even vaguely resembles Ally McBeal.

  Ally McBeal (SABC3, Mondays, 9.30pm) is rapidly gathering something approaching popularity among 20- and 30-something white South Africans. Set in what I gather is a Canadian law firm, it is billed as a sophisticated sitcom. By “sophisticated” I presume they mean it doesn’t have a laugh track. As for the sitcom, I see plenty of sitting but precious little comedy.

  The show is a kind of three-step guide to first-year philosophy, a fabric-softened, tumble-dried wrangle with ethics, existentialism and Humean uncertainty. Like the academic career of many a feeble BA student, it takes its entire dramatic impetus from Ally’s utter inability to make up her mind. Should I laugh? Should I cry? Should I pout more? Could I pout more? The next time I speak, should I finish one sentence before starting another? These are not, sadly, questions that ever receive the correct answer.

  “Hi, I just wanted to … if you’re sure you’re not busy … because if you are I can come back some other … no really, it’s no problem … oh, if you’re really sure … if you’re sure you’re sure … ha ha … just wanted to say, you know, good morning.”

  Ally is played with diffident blankness by one Calista Flockhart, a name to give anyone an existential crisis. I don’t like saying her name out loud – it sounds like a remedy for the kind of intimate female condition I’m not at all comfortable talking about.

  She has two methods of dramatising her various crises of confidence. In the first, popular in some households, she blinks while pouting into the middle distance. In the other, a favourite in my neighbourhood, she blinks while pouting at the floor. You can almost he
ar the self-help mantra in her head: I blink, therefore I am.

  Perhaps the greatest entertainment the show offers is the intellectual and aesthetic challenge of deciding precisely which barnyard animal it is that Ms Flockhart so closely resembles.

  General consensus tips the poultry family, with the proud goose topping the polls, though the humble duck is rallying strongly, but I favour another of our farmhouse friends. Those languorously curling lashes, those curiously motile lips, that intolerable slowness of reaction – that’s no duck, that’s Ally McVeal.

  It’s astonishing, this ethic of agonising self-doubt with which the Americans infect our TV screens. Ally is just the latest in a noisome line of long-faced whiners who don’t know how to be happy. From thirtysomething in the eighties to the latest baby-cursed series of Mad About You, we are subjected to an unending stream of self-consciousness, a narcissistic dissection of every impulse, obsession and pre-packaged emotion they can scrounge together.

  Small wonder that women are reading books about running with wolves, and men have to take Viagra – there are no simple pleasures left in sitcom land. It’s a fidgety, squirmy, over-refined world in which “because I enjoy it” isn’t a good enough answer any more.

  That’s why Seinfeld (SABC3, Thursdays, 9.30pm) will be so sorely missed. It’s not that prissy Jerry who makes the show, nor Elaine, nor even the all-powerful Kramer. No, it’s George who gives us hope each Thursday – George Costanza, the most sneaky, selfish, amoral, un-self-doubting liar and cheat ever to grace the small screen with his sly, balding schemes. George is everyman – he is you, he is me, in our weak, beery, most conscience-free moments he is everything we want to be. He is the Wizard of Id.

  Down the hatch with Keith Floyd

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 5 JULY 1998

  I’M NOT MUCH of a cook. Washing dishes, yes – it is soothing, sensual and one of the few activities besides shaving off your moustache that offers you both immediate solitude and the subsequent gratitude of others. In addition – shameful confession – there is something nostalgically comforting about the amniotic warmth of the suds.