And when I cannot reply, oh what awful scenes there do follow. Such scenes as I cannot describe, lest your parrot read the lining of its cage and be irredeemably corrupted. Needless to say, I am concerned. I haven’t had such dreams since those dark days in the early eighties when I was visited nightly by the lady from the Morkels adverts. Do you remember her? I can’t explain it either. I can only remind myself of the story that many of the male members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, and indeed her political opponents, reported erotic dreams about the Boss. Consider that, and join me in turning my face towards the heavens and asking, in a trembling voice, “Ye gods! What horrors lurk in the heart of men?”
While we strive each day to walk the straight and narrow path, through the meadows and the broad and sunlit uplands, alas our darker drives are not ours to command. Oh, we men are beasts. We deserve to be punished.
On stage with Jerry Springer
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 19 JANUARY 2003
HAVE YOU EVER wondered how the producers of Jerry Springer’s American show lure their guests on air? I have. Every episode features some or other variety of grinning hillbilly who has contacted the show in order to air his or her toothless atrocities, and each of those stories entails bringing into the studio some ungrinning hillbillies, the artless victims of those atrocities, who have no idea why they are there. I am not myself a hillbilly, toothed or otherwise, so I have never really understood precisely why a man would say to his wife, “Sure, honey, I’ll be a guest with you on The Jerry Springer Show. Won’t tell me what it’s about, eh? No problem. Say, why are we bringing granddad and the vacuum cleaner with us?”
Surely, I have always thought, the producers must use some other cunning strategem to lure the witless on stage. And then this week, sitting in the Green Room backstage at Jerry Springer’s South African show, drinking complimentary vodka through a straw while waiting to be called for makeup, a terrible thought occurred to me. What if their cunning strategem is to phone and say: “We would like you to be a guest on Jerry’s chat show. No, no, not that show, the other one. The respectable one.”
The thought made me wobble a little at the knees. I scoured my memory for indiscretions and the kind of harmless youthful eccentricities you pay witnesses to keep quiet about. I didn’t fancy the prospect of bounding on stage to be confronted with a Greek chorus of bad memories pointing their fingers at me while the audience hissed and checked its dictionaries to get a clearer picture of my perversions. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with smart alecs making barnyard sounds whenever I entered a room.
Jerry Springer’s Saturday Night (M-Net, Saturdays, after the movie) is Jerry Springer’s other show. Unlike his American series, it has no truck with adulterers, paedophiles, incestuous love triangles and foot fetishists. No, wait, that’s not true – rather, the adulterers, paedophiles, incestuous love triangles and foot fetishists with which it has truck don’t actually admit to it. The idea of the show is that Jerry interviews local celebrities of interest. Hands up who can spot the fatal flaw in that idea.
For some weeks now I have felt immensely sorry for Jerry Springer. Imagine flying 25 hours out of Chicago once a month to interview Heinz Winkler or Amore Vittone. No really – imagine it. Speaking to Heinz Winkler must be something like sticking your head inside an empty washing machine and murmuring phrases in Esperanto. Except after five minutes of interviewing Heinz Winkler, you would want to turn the washing machine on. With your head still inside.
Some weeks ago I watched Jerry interviewing a radio DJ named Nicole Fox. What questions can you think of to ask radio DJ Nicole Fox? Me neither. Neither could Jerry. The interview consisted of Jerry gallantly saying “You don’t have a face for radio,” and radio DJ Nicole Fox agreeing between cackles of the kind of laughter that terrified the Munchkins when they heard it swooping overhead. Sometimes she would cackle even when Jerry hadn’t said anything. “Gee,” I remember saying aloud to my bourbon, “how deep are they going to have to reach for guests? I hope there is someone leaning over that barrel with mighty long arms.”
Apparently their arms are like the tentacles of a giant squid, because last night there I was, sweating in front of the cameras, trying to remember which is my best side, or whether I even have a best side, and cursing those extra helpings of Christmas pudding. I was on screen for 10 minutes, which means three hours idling in the Green Room beforehand, hoovering up the buffet and playing “I-spy” with the other guests. My heart sank when I arrived to find Mark Banks, resplendent on the waiting-room sofa, wearing a shirt shiny and green and ornate, like a Muslim Christmas tree. You don’t want to be on the same show as Mark Banks. Mark Banks is very funny, and a funny guest makes other guests look dull. If you’re a guest, you want to avoid Mark Banks as a rabid dog avoids his water bowl. You want to be on a show with, say, Heinz Winkler or radio DJ Nicole Fox.
During an ad break, Tobie Cronjé and I stripped down and oiled up and engaged in a bout of Greco-Roman wrestling to decide who would have to go on directly after Mark Banks. Tobie was surprisingly powerful and had several painful grappling moves, but I am proud to announce that the correspondent for your quality Sunday newspaper won through. Panic lent strength to my headlock.
In the end it was all very jolly backstage, after the vodka kicked in. I met a group of pleasant young men calling themselves the Sons of Trout, who I imagine are some manner of religious cult, but very polite with it. There was a blonde woman named Wes-Lee who claimed to be some manner of singer. “So, what do you do?” we asked each other simultaneously.
The interview passed in a blur and a stammer and a hot tick-tock. I was pleased to note that there were no Tennessee mountain folk on stage accusing me of impregnating their goats or their trailer vans, but less pleased to notice the collective sigh of disappointment from the audience when I emerged. I think they had been expecting Simon Gear.
Afterwards the producers patted me kindly on the shoulders. “Never mind,” they said, “you did your best.”
After the show a member of the audience sidled up and asked me for an autograph. “Certainly,” I said, beaming graciously, taking up a pen with a flourish.
“Not yours. Jerry’s,” said the audience member. He looked at me narrowly. “What’s your name again?”
Big Brother Iraq
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 23 MARCH 2003
‘AS I SPEAK to you, every part of my body is entirely sealed!” said Emma in the northern Kuwaiti desert. I couldn’t be sure it was true – Sky News’ coverage of the war in the Gulf, while impressively thorough, couldn’t take us that far into the heart of the campaign.
Emma was a frightening sight – in her head-to-toe charcoal-lined camouflage protective suit and her weirdly anachronistic gas mask, she resembled some sort of paramilitary Womble. Throughout the day, whenever we crossed to the troops in northern Kuwait, Emma was either struggling into her protective gear or wriggling from it, the cold and fearful sound of the gas-alert siren or – almost indistinguishable – the all-clear in the background. On one occasion we crossed over to find that Emma had taken refuge in the bunker. The camera, fixed on its tripod, impassively showed distant men running, shouting, affixing their gas masks, kicking up small clouds of desert sand. For a terrible, terrible moment before sanity reasserted itself I leant closer to the screen, hoping something exciting might be about to happen. For that dreadful moment I forgot I was watching a war. It was as though I were watching Big Brother Iraq.
The 24-hour multi-channel coverage of operations in Iraq is even more surreal than coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. The various international news channels this time were better prepared, with journalists on the front lines, on aircraft carriers, attached to infantry units and tank divisions. The news-gathering and news-transmission operations are as carefully planned and executed as the military procedures themselves. What’s worse, with 10 years of Reality TV conditioning the way we experience real life and television – and real life on television – it become
s increasingly difficult not to treat the coverage as another species of entertainment, an unfolding saga with twists and turns and unexpected surprises.
Since Thursday morning the war has been playing itself out in our living rooms like an elaborate drama series, complete with theme music and credits and titles and celebrity guests and constant scrolling updates on the story so far. Strangely, having reporters there on the ground, speaking into the microphone with one hand blocking an ear against the noise of a Cobra helicopter gunship passing overhead, saying things like “There has been a fire-fight on the outskirts of Basra, just a few kilometres from here”, somehow does not make the war more real. It makes it seem like any other Reality show. We have seen so much on television pretending to be real, these last years, that nothing on television feels real any more.
Once again, Sky News has edged out the competition at CNN and BBC World in the battle of the broadcasters. While the others lapse occasionally into logos and channel idents and – CNN’s speciality – inserts explaining just how they have managed to set up their cameras and where the broadcasting unit is located, Sky’s coverage – or “intelligence”, I suppose you would say – has all the depth and variety you expect from modern war coverage. Plus, there is the quirky pleasure of hearing the Sky reporters refer to the “Dee-Em-Zed”, instead of the Americans’ “Dee-Em-Zee”.
I made some slight attempt to watch the local channels, but I was defeated. When I crossed over to e.tv, some local worthy was explaining to Debra Patta how the working classes of South Africa were going to bring the Bush regime to its knees by “boycotting American movies and American oil”. Over on SABC3, we were talking to Rene Horne, live in Baghdad. “It’s very tense here,” said Rene Horne, half a day after the first missiles started landing in Baghdad. “Almost like a war zone.”
When the war first started I was jumping from one channel to the next – like the multi-camera views in the Big Brother house – but now I seldom budge from Sky. Oh yes, when men in distant parts are killing each other, I demand nothing but the best.
Intimations of mortuaries
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 6 APRIL 2003
I DO HOPE YOU can read this column today – if the writing is too faint and spidery and trails away, I can only offer my apologies and the assurance that it won’t go on forever. I am getting older, you see, and my hand is not as firm nor as steady as once it was. Today is my birthday, and at my back I have the distinct impression that I hear the snorts and whinnies and muffled hoofbeats of time’s winged chariot drawing near. Either that, or the neighbour has made up with her boyfriend again.
And yet I am not downcast. Age creeps up on one, like a Gurkha in the jungles of Malaya, belly-down in the tropical ferns and a kukri between his teeth, but not everything that stirs in the night is an assassin. I am in good spirits today. I greet the advancing world with a smile and a whistle and I offer it a sip of my drink. The rest of the year is for worrying; on your birthday you deserve a break.
In the run-up to my birthday, I must confess, my mind has been turning to matters of mortality. Last Monday I tuned in to Six Feet Under (e.tv, Mondays, 9pm), to see what insights I could glean. Six Feet Under – a sort of quirky American drama series set in a family mortuary – is gathering some sort of international cult momentum. It is billed as a black comedy because it has dead people in it and because it has moments of idiosyncrasy. Idiosyncrasy is what people without humour offer when they want to be amusing but they don’t want to crack one-liners or tell jokes.
The show is written by Alan Ball, who won an Oscar for writing American Beauty. I was never that impressed with the script for American Beauty. That famous scene in which the gawky teenage boy shows Thora Birch the video-tape of a plastic packet blowing in the wind only worked for me because that is precisely the kind of self-conscious, inarticulate groping for an arresting point of view that is characteristic of gawky teenage boys who have spent too much time on their own, and most of that time hoping that they are in some way special. (I say “they”, though of course I mean “we”.) “There is so much beauty in the world,” says the gawky teenage boy mistily, looking at the footage of the plastic bag, “I don’t know if I can take it.”
I would be far more impressed by the scene if I could shake the nagging suspicion that Allan Ball intends us to take the gawky teenage boy and his plastic bag seriously. Certainly audiences around the world did take it seriously, and loved it, but that is not always the writer’s fault. In this case, though, I think the writer was with his audience all the way. There is a lumbering, over-obvious earnestness about the story and its so-called twists which, if it isn’t a case of ultra-ultra-refined satire, are so dull as to paralyse the brain.
I have the same feeling with Six Feet Under. It is a series about people straining to make sense of their lives against the perpetual dark backcloth of death. As are we all. But – aha! – the show takes place in a funeral parlour. See! Death is all around us! The death, I can’t shake the feeling, is there in the way that Death or Sin or Virtue appeared in medieval morality plays – to spell itself out so obviously that even the most chuckleheaded viewer can’t miss the point. Even worse, in this particular version of black comedy, the dead people provide all the blackness and all the comedy, and that is really why the show does not work for me.
The comic vision, and especially the black comic vision, is one that – if it is genuine – permeates the entire story and its characterisations. It has many forms and avatars, depending on whose vision it is, but one of its consistent qualities is a sense of the ridiculous that comes of human beings’ attempts to take themselves and their doings seriously.
I say “seriously”, but really I mean “earnestly” or “self-importantly”. It is possible to be simultaneously comic and serious; it is possible to perceive absurdity while believing that one’s relationship with absurdity is a matter that has meaning. Six Feet Under is not black comedy, it is a drama series that regards itself with a great deal of self-importance.
Death is in the script simply to provide macabre gags and to provide the silvering on the mirrors in which the characters endlessly examine themselves in a series of interminable monologues posing as conversations. There is a thumping predictability, as though it were written by a gifted teenager who still has the gifted teenager’s blight of imagining that he is the first to have discovered the tortured minutiae of hormonal existentialism.
Six Feet Under is not bad television. Indeed, it is because it is good television that I have taken it sufficiently seriously to figure out why I don’t like it. There is pleasure in that. Of course, bad television has its own pleasures – they are fugitive pleasures but none the less welcome. This is the 300th column I have written in this newspaper about the variegated pleasures of watching television, and I thank you for reading them. I don’t imagine you have read all 300 – not even I have read all 300, and my mother certainly hasn’t – but every bit helps. I can’t imagine that I shall write another 300 columns – there are younger television viewers out there with sharper eyes and tongues and newfangled palmtops in which to take their notes, rather than a tatty notebook and a leaking biro. But I have enjoyed being here, and if you will have me, I shall stick around a little longer yet.
Never mind Willy – free Harry
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 29 JUNE 2003
PRINCE WILLIAM TURNED 21 this week, which didn’t really come as a surprise. It had to happen sooner or later, and this was as good a week as any. To mark the occasion, M-Net screened The Reluctant Royal, a documentary about, well, Will. How reluctant is Will? He is so reluctant he didn’t appear in the documentary at all, except in file footage and old clips of him as a jolly toddler, all kitted out in stripy jersey and tiny red shorts. It was quite sweet to see – I had forgotten how much Prince William, aged four, looked like Simon Gear, aged now.
Despite not having an actual prince to talk to, the documentary did all it could. What it could do was footage of fringe. Oh, he has a mighty
fringe, does William. We saw the fringe from all angles. We saw it from above, from the side, from the other side. We didn’t see it from a Will’s eye-view, of course, because Will is very reluctant. His reluctance extends to cameras being strapped to his forehead.
So there was no Will-cam, but it was an impressive fringe, if you like fringes. It was the kind of fringe I spent years envying as a schoolboy. All the cool kids in Durban had fringes like that – they hung down and you could look through them, and the cool kids could flick them back with a toss of the head. The really cool kids could stick out their lower lips and blow upwards, and the fringe would levitate. I never had such a fringe. My hair was of the wrong sort. It waved when it should have flopped. It had too much relationship with gravity. That is one of the reasons I resent Oprah. Whenever she says: “You can be anything you want to be”, I always want to reply: “Oh yeah? Well, I want to have a fringe like Prince William’s. Or like Stuart Wright, who sat two desks down in Mr Nupen’s history class.”
There were times when the documentary succeeded in its primary task: winning our sympathy for the reluctant prince. It is not really in my nature to have much fellow-feeling for some tall, rich, befringed future king. Seldom do I think of William and sigh aloud, “Poor bugger.” Rarely do I look up from the muddle and murk of my life and think: “Could be worse. At least I’m not heir to the throne of Windsor.” But perhaps I should, because it can’t be all fun. A moment in the show brought that home.
There was old footage of Diana on holiday in the Caribbean with her young sons. They were splashing at the sea’s edge, laughing, happy together. The water was blue and the sun danced on the surface and made their fringes shine like electrum. “Not such a bad life,” I thought.
But I Digress ... Page 12