Andrew Worsdale and Janet Smith
Realised on an amazingly tight budget of less than R11 000 per minute, Natural Rhythm came cheap. Yet it could also inadvertently be the first trickle in a stream of new local soaps on public service TV.
Waspish, high-class, politically pungent, carcinoma-induced soap opera, it introduces us to white women on the verge of nervous breakdowns during the time of the first democratic election.
It’s got everything: political intrigue, cheating on husbands and wives, alcoholism, homosexuality, paedophilia, slow-burning diseases, dysfunctional families and death. In the end, it’s straining for one decent love story amid a slough of sex sagas. One full frontal is more than enough, but we also see too much clothed copulation for one series.
Fran, an activist and supporter of ”the Boksburg Seven” is played with gusto by Jennifer Steyn. She sees her life crumble when her five-year-old daughter is abducted, raped and murdered, and soon we are introduced to the exclusive club of friends who people her life.
Dorothy-Ann Gould is the best friend whose dipsomaniac husband is played by Wilson Dunster. Gavin van den Berg and Jocelyn Broderick are a wealthy couple cheating on each other. Andrew Buckland is a sympathetic doctor who eventually sleeps with someone and Kevin Smith is the priest.
Van Den Berg hopes that Natural Rythm will become compulsive viewing: ”That’s why we’re screening it in batches of two episodes after each other a week, to keep the audience hooked, and if people call it a glamorised soap that’s okay — we’ll probably get more viewers.”
If this Be Treason, a dramatised biography of Helen Joseph from her early days of political agitation through to her nine- year house arrest for nine years and her death, is deeply impressive.
Its only low-budget moment is a recreation of the historic women’s freedom march in 1956 which is the only point in the series where archival photographs are intercut with the dramatised footage. Apart from this cheap and nasty evil, the miniseries has an abiding sense of dramatic style. Gillian Garlick especially excels in the lead role.
Sex between oiled-up black men and white women in all their pallid glory is now worth less than the flutter of an eyelash on our small screen. Avenues, the new adult soap made in South Africa, will have to present us with other themes to turn us on when it is broadcast on SABC3 later this year.
An alien lover, perhaps?