Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON
No, I’m not trying to send her up when I offer the embattled Dr Nkosazana Zuma most sincere congratulations on her face-off with the tobacco industry. With uncanny vigilance, Zuma has seen the way things could go if tobacco barons aren’t beheaded more expeditiously.
She’s clearly been watching how efficiently South African Breweries is presently selling liquor to children. It’s a grim fable, but worth an ear.
We’re all suitably touched by the example of “caring business” South African Breweries (SAB) presents with its sponsorship of cricket, how its eleemosynary vitality forces it to pour countless millions into wetting the rainbow roof. Alas, like all virtue, cricket sponsorship extracts a sly wage.
When deciding to sponsor a cricket series, the first thing SAB had to do was persuade television dispensaries, like the SABC and M-Net, to look the other way while SAB went apeshit with regard to al l the accepted advertising controls.
The brewmasters used a reliable method: sponsorship came only with the guarantee that broadcasters allowed SAB to advertise beer non-stop throughout the hours of play.
There is no doubt that in a televised cricket test match, one-hundred-percent- inundating-all-engulfing-liquor-advertising
takes place because: (a) fucking great Castle Beer logos are painted all over the field; (b) every cricket stump is adorned with the word Castle; (c) another fucking great Castle logo takes up about 20% of the television screen; (d) the SABC has threatened Trevor Quirk with a course of elocution lessons unless he undertakes to repeat the word “Castle” every 20 seconds; (e) the players wear Castle Beer logos on their clothing; (f) everywhere you look you see Castle Beer slogans, advertising hoardings and close-ups of happy spectators drinking the stuff
When asked to explain why, the SABC, M-Net, the ad agencies and, of course, that stalwart Olympian Council, the Advertising Standards Authority, reply to the above in electric disavowal: “All these Castle Beer slogans, logos, adverts and mentions are not “actual advertising” they cry. Rather they are “non-intrusive static sponsor presence”. Which means that, although five or six Castle Beer logos are on continual illuminated display in your living room for eight hours a day, no one’s actually trying to sell you any beer.
Better still, no one’s trying to sell beer to your kids. With their toes now in the door, SAB salesmen start running full- frontal beer commercials. In these the drinking of beer is specified as a sure-fire path to cricketing prowess.
By means of cross-editing, cricketing skill is not only associated with the drinking of beer, it is deemed obligatory. A shot of Alan Donald taking a wicket is intercut with a shot of a beer bottle being opened, a shot of Dave Richardson taking an impossible catch is intercut with beer being poured, Jonty Rhodes dives at the stumps as a beer glass gets emptied.
In other words, SAB says to the nation’s youngsters: “You guys want to be really good at cricket like these guys? Tell Mommy to put a six-pack in your lunchbox.”
Not as far out as you may think. Last year, on an SAA flight, I saw a bangle-drenched yuppie mother pouring wine into her two children – of about four and six years old. She actually asked for and was served a carafe and glasses.
The older child got more ornery while the younger one vomited it all up. I tell this festive story because in these, his headlong Zero Tolerance days, breweries crimebuster, Citizen Kahn, might just be interested to know that encouraging children to drink alcohol can be interpreted in law as criminal assault.
In hustling beer to children by means of adverts that submit dangerously counterfeit propositions, it can be argued that SAB and the SABC are guilty of exactly the same trespass. (My source: a respectable attorney and a professor of criminal law.)
And so, back to slapping Zuma on the back. She is going to ban tobacco sponsorship of golf matches, yacht races and so on. For this she is being vividly dumped on in the papers by a series of emphysematic drunkards with progressive cardio-vascular collapse, disguised as journalists.
To hell with them. You are a great big doll, Dr Zee. More power to you. If you can inhibit tobacco giants from selling lung cancer and stop the tycoons from turning our children into alcoholics, you’ve got my vote.