Anthony Egan
TREKKING: In Search of the Real South Africa ‘by Denis Beckett ‘(Penguin, R59,99)
One of the (few) popular and quality local television programmes currently showing is the quirky, opinionated, sometimes angry but always watchable Beckett’s Trek. Ajournalist with attitude, Denis Beckett takes often all-too-close looks at the realities and foibles of contemporary South Africa. In this book he takes us behind the scenes to look at the making of such a series, the stuff that didn’t reach the television screen as well as the bits that did.
Bureaucratic mishaps, the pros and cons of raves, nature conservation, new and improved rural longdrops, crime, small-town realities in the new South Africa, and the question of affirmative action are all subjects dealt with in this book of the series. And nobody gets away with what he sees as stupidity, no matter their class,race or gender.
Beckett is at heart, I think, a controversialist. He thrives on making people squirm, particularly those who deserve it. Whether its an attack on Cabinet ministers who have boarded the gravy train too readily or those particularly irritating liberals who now are the country’s prophets of doom and gloom, Beckett has a unique ability to cut through pretension and expose their agendas.
This may all sound terribly self-righteous and ‘right on’, but Beckett ‘ in his television series and in this book ‘ manages to do this with the right combination of satire, observation and indignation that shows he is nobody’s stooge.
At the same time Trekking manages to capture the behind-the-scenes feel ”a mixture of planning,bungling,excitement and boredom ”that goes into making a documentary series.
We learn about the documentary film-maker’s tricks of the trade in a way that doesn’t bore us senseless with techo-jargon. For example, he talks about the way interviews are cut ”first the person being interviewed, then the journalist asking the questions and responding appropriately, all edited together to create the impression of spontanaiety. This’he sums up as ‘the noddy’, adding his own barbed asides on the verbal diarrhoea that seems to be part of South Africa-speak.
No reader, I suspect, will agree with all the opinions Beckett readily and regularly expresses in this book. Nor do I think Beckett would want us to ”the impression one gets is that he seems pretty game for an argument most of the time.
Some starchy English-language purists might be a little miffed by his deliberate use of South Africanisms, but this gives a really lekker authenticity to his reportage.
Beckett’s semi-last word to the reader is to ‘stoke up your piggy bank in readiness for Trekking II’. Such shameless self-publicity should receive only one response: start stoking!