Maureen Barnes Down the tube
It’s probably age, but I got competely confused last week between the shots of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) invasion of Bophuthatswana and those of the South African National Defence Force marching into Lesotho.
Scenes of the AWB fiasco were screened on TV in the wake of the truth commission hearing of the man who cold- bloodedly murdered three captive AWB men. Scenes of the Lesotho adventure were excitingly live – except for some of those involved, too many of whom were unexcitingly dead.
Perhaps confusion is understandable – both parties regarded themselves as saviours, both went in to “help stabilise the situation”, and both, in my view, needed their heads examined.
When the Lesotho story first broke, and after we’d all checked our calendars to make sure it wasn’t April 1, I was annoyed that law and order in small foreign states seemed to be more of a priority with our government than eliminating mayhem in our own country. However, after seeing what happened to Lesotho in just a couple of days, I reckon we are better off without help from that quarter.
A disquieting note or two could be heard in the utterances of South African government representatives over the incident, beginning with Mangosuthu Buthelezi, when the media was chastised for “biased and negative reporting” on the Lesotho invasion. This is a depressing attitude which seems to have been learned at the knee of former oppressors.
While those who endured years of imprisonment might be forgiven for not quite grasping the value of a free press, it is dispiriting to see how little was learned of the concept of unfettered speech by people who spent years of exile in democratic countries.
It comes, I suppose, from boasting about one of my favourite programmes being awarded an Emmy. Pride, as they sayeth, indeed goeth before a fall. There I was, sitting happily watching The Practice, when on to the screen skipped the dreaded Ally McBeal and that tailor’s dummy she both works with and lusts after.
Was this a hallucinatory nightmare? I checked the digestive biscuits I was scoffing and though they seemed all right, I was a bit suspicious because McBeal didn’t go away. Dressed in her usual teeny tiny skirt and whining away in her teeny tiny voice, she mingled with the nice, down-to-earth Practice crew. It was a bizarre sight.
Until that moment I had ignored the ugly rumours that David E Kelley, the creator of both Ally McBeal and The Practice, was smitten with the real life McBeal, Callista Flockhart. It seemed preposterous to think that anyone married to that beautiful and talented grown-up woman, Michelle Pfeiffer, could fancy the anorexic Flockhart.
But Kelley was the only person with the authority to write McBeal into The Practice so perhaps, after all, there is some truth in the gossip. If so, the man must have lost his marbles.
Incidentally, it was extraordinary to see how the introduction of characters from one series into another blew away all credibility. One moment you were absorbed by the characters and the plot, and the next all reality fled and the fiction was exposed. Bad move, Kelley.
One of my favourite programmes is the modest little Australian series Water Rats, which relates the ongoing exploits of the Sydney Water Police. I found the first series unexpectedly exciting, particularly the ending when the villain turned out to be a policeman and new fianc of the female lead. The present series is just as good and should be a lesson to us on how to produce realistic, well-written local entertainment. It features the good actor, Colin Friels, who played the amiable mental- home guard in that wonderful movie of a year or so ago, Cosi.
Water Rats is on M-Net at 7pm on Fridays – at least it has been until now, but who knows what changes imaginative scheduling might bring?