New soapie The Burning Issue just doesn’t wash, says ANDREW WORSDALE
WHY are South African sit-coms and soapies so strained and dreadful and boring? My belief is it’s because they try to serve as education and as drama, with teaching and issues always taking the upper hand. Apart from the critically acclaimed hit series Soul City, most local drama series are stilted, patronising and just plain badly written.
Then again, Soul City, which served as an educative piece about health, had lots of juicy melodrama to deal with, like TB, Aids, child abuse and the tangibly sordid stuff of life, particularly sickness and death, that makes for good television.
Yet another example of the awful genre is the new multi-lingual (yet predominantly Pedi) drama series The Burning Issue. It is a maze of topicality, dealing with the spread of current social afflictions from the RDP, affirmative action, the gravy train and housing policies to drug abuse, music stars and lesbianism (no prizes for guessing who Yoyo, the drug-addicted gay girl, pop star character is based on).
Akin in some ways to Generations, it’s like a The Black and the Beautiful – an unashamed soapie set in the new South Africa, filled with empowered black elite and corrupt white hangers-on from the former era. Despite its unmitigated tacky melodrama, it’s described in SABC press releases as a sit-com, which is closer to the mark if you enjoy laughing at badly made TV programmes. It’s laughable from beginning to end.
The plot revolves around a property developer, Khuduego Khuduego, the managing director of Imagine Projects, who is heading a low-cost housing plan backed by the council. He runs into all kinds of hassles – as a former political prisoner he’s accused by others of climbing on the gravy train and running the show on his own. White companies accuse him of being party to “affirmative action’s” reverse racism. And there are other boils is his personal life – an affair with his secretary; a desire to have a son to inherit his empire and, worst of all, the aforementioned troublesome daughter – a drug-addicted lesbian pop star who hangs out in Hillbrow.
Everything about it is so on-the-button issue- wise you can see the drama looming ahead of you like a blimp about to explode. Plot points are made through telephone calls and newspapers – one of TV and cinema’s cardinal sins – and the dialogue spells out the issues clumsily but in no uncertain terms.
What’s worse is there’s no style in the performance or direction. The actors all walk into frame like they have to keep their backs to the scenery, which they do, creeping along the walls like insects. Most of it is done in master shots so the tempo just sits there like a bloated school play. Despite the horrendous tackiness of American soaps like Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful, they cut between close-ups incessantly, upping the ante of the personal melodrama between their model- cum-actor stars.
For all the laudable intentions of this series in dealing with issues like corruption, the RDP, fat cats getting fatter and homophobia, it’s the execution that irks the most. It’s like handicap television – all the men are rampantly successful buppies and the women are weak and subservient.
Colin Selahle, writer and producer of the show who has made six drama series for the SABC, is a charming man and he’s quick to deflect his critics. “It’s lovely when a show creates controversy because that sparks debate … It sets tongues wagging …”
When confronted about TV shows relying too much on edu-speak and not enough on gossip and melodrama, Selahle says: “The subject matter in this series is intended to stir up debate and if people talk about it then maybe others in high places will do something about corruption and the gravy train, even though my belief is that television should be entertaining – a sort of escapism.”
The problem, though, is that you want to escape from the TV set when watching this dull lecture. Truly successful soapies like The Bold and the Beautiful and Neighbours thrive on the sordid personal melodramas of people’s lives, inevitably twirling up a spiral of coincidences and minor tragedies along the way, but they don’t dwell on a socio-political tract. To some extent Egoli is successful in this regard, but for the most part, shows like Generations hit the viewer with an ideological stick that gets in the way of drama. Surely there’s a more entertaining way to get the message across.
The Burning Issue is on SABC2 at 7.30pm on Mondays