TELEVISION: Luke Alfred
CHRIS DU PLESSIS is a former Vrye Weekblad journalist and now director of CCV-TV’s Thursday night amalgam of local culture, Not Quite Friday Night. It contains all sorts of things — local music, off-beat interviews, comedy sketches.
Last week’s programme featured one of the more bizarre forms of local subculture: a koedoebokdrolverspoeg competition (in which men see how far they can spit nuggets of kudu dung).
“That guy Boet Burger can tell you all you need to know about a red reebok turd, or a duiker turd,” says Du Plessis, trying not to laugh. “It’s all part of a highly developed sense of humour; they kept a straight face throughout the thing, and then, when the camera was off, they were just lying on the floor laughing.”
Du Plessis’ directorial debut came as a result of CCV’s drive to throw work the way of small production houses who don’t have the budgets to compete with the big boys. He can’t speak highly enough of CCV’s Pat Kelly, but he reserves the greatest compliment for his boss, Sheiks Makhado, and his willingness to include items on the earthy art of drolspoeg.
Boet Burger and his turd-spitting Waterberg friends are only one of the weird items featured on the show in recent weeks: others have included interviews with a pair of Sumo wrestlers from Alberton; a black rabbi; and a python- loving, English, former bouncer and honorary Zulu.
Behind the programme’s sense of humour and love of the grotesque lurks something serious. “The concept was to give people a chance; now that’s not just black people, necessarily. I mean, look at me — I know nothing about TV,” says Du Plessis.
Besides being obviously celebratory and demythologising (episode one featured Johnny Clegg in a walk-on part as a janitor), the programme is commemorative, featuring a regular insert on black musicians such as Hilda Tloubatla, of the Mahotella Queens, and the famous pennywhistler, Lemmy Mabaso.
Is the programme, which places so much emphasis on the vitality of local culture, perhaps the practical working out of some deeply held personal theories?
“I think these things belong to everyone here with a bit of intelligence — I don’t think that they’re my theories,” he replies passionately.
Yet so much of what he’s been speaking about is there in the programme.
“Ja, well, don’t you feel the same way?” he replies. “I admit that I have this aggressive little educational angle. My beat as a journalist has been African music, because we’re the only place in the world that took big band jazz and swing and reformulated it Here’s the story of Lemmy Special Mabaso: that guy is eight years old and he goes in to the streets of Johannesburg with a little pipe with six holes in it and supports his family. Now that’s an amazing story.”