Maureen Barnes Down the tube
Two local programmes gave me the worst case of dyspepsia in the past week. First came Top Billing, which has a certain jolliness about it -but it then confronted us with a profile on Edith Venter. Many readers outside Gauteng will be muttering “Who dat?” – which would undoubtedly depress Ms Venter, who spends most of her waking hours being “a Personality”.
Let me enlighten them. Ms Venter, through nothing more than a craving for publicity, tenacity and an obscenely large divorce settlement, has become big in what passes for high society in Johannesburg.
We saw her house, which scales new
heights of opulent vulgarity. We met a couple of the lady’s sycophantic entourage. First her interior decorater pointed out some really darling features, including her son’s room – done over in scarlet and navy: “We think it looks like a bordello,” he said. “But he’s a 14-year-old boy, so that’s how it should be.”
Not where I come from, sweetness. Meanwhile, the rather humourless Edith kept changing her clothes for us. Let’s be honest, she’s frankly middle- aged and, despite all that money, she looks it. What a pity then, that she persists in revealing her rather chunky legs – and a lot more besides – in garments which I’m sure cause quite a few chuckles among the chaps.
The pice de rsistance, sartorially speaking, was a totally transparent evening dress under which our Edith wears nothing. Such titillation might send geriatric males into a positive frenzy of desire, but is unlikely to arouse anything more than embarrassment in everyone else.
The designer of this awful creation pointed out how it enabled us to see that Edith had no cellulite. Edith simpered.
Top Billing’s compre called this publicity-crazed woman “enigmatic” – a misnomer if I ever heard one – and also described her as a businesswoman. Edith, apparently, has recently taken a job as public relations officer for a jewellery company which she plugged unmercifully on the programme.
The other local production which depressed me was the second instalment of Flux, SABC3’s new arts programme. The first one was bad enough, but this, on architecture, was worse. You’d have to go a long way to find a more pretentious and self-conscious piece of work. I’m all for young, vibrant talent but this is like listening to the inane outpourings of a bunch of undergraduate know-alls.
And it was all so dated: from the reproduced dictionary definition of words – a device which wasn’t new when Carte Blanche used it 10 years ago – to the “clever” camerawork where people are filmed as though through letterboxes.
They should print a warning for viewers not to adjust their sets during these disconcerting interludes. The photographer also thought it incredibly innovative to carry his camera at knee height along staircase railings. This was supposed to create an atmosphere but didn’t.
The intrusive backing track was cribbed from early sci-fi movies – unearthly choral screams accompanied by atonal electronic plunkings. And as for the script. What can I say?
Among the gobbledygook was a prolonged reference to mystical “chakras, or energy centres” which, with the millennium madness on us, is, I suppose, no nuttier than having a fortune teller on radio. But art it ain’t.
The script included gems of idiocy – “architecture is a sexual urge”, “sacred is a word as fanciful as it is fashionable” – along with sweeping generalisations and inaccuracies. Early Johannesburg was, they reckoned, “a city of tea-drinkers and cake nibblers and palm courts”, when in fact it has always been a rough, tough place, even if sometimes hidden under a lace tablecloth.
Or, in referring to the current exodus to the suburbs: “There’s nothing the white middle class in South Africa hates more than poverty.” Well, I don’t think anyone, anywhere, enjoys poverty – whether their own or someone else’s. Fortunately an American architect put things into perspective on this one when he took the racism out of it and drew a comparison between Johannesburg and some United States cities.
It also seems to me that while it might be just a little doubtful for Darrel Bristow-Bovey, the TV critic for a Sunday newspaper, to accept the post of story editor on Flux, it is decidedly unethical for him to promote it, as he did in his column recently.
But he does deserve a brownie point for openly admitting to being party to this load of self-indulgent old rubbish.