Review of the week:Matthew Krouse
A morning in the 5fm studio with Mark Gillman is a bit like a morning in the locker room of the local gym. There are lots of brawny blokes about, some wearing Mark Gillman T- shirts that read: “Seize the morning!”
There’s something in Gillman’s character that allows him to do much more than that. He doesn’t just seize the morning – he seems to take it by the balls. Currently one of Johannesburg’s most listened to drive timers – the other being 702’s John Robbie – Gillman’s surprise is that his voice is void of any smoky radio charm. It grates, and he has a sharp nasal twang that booms through the sedate lobby of the SABC.
The place has been somewhat jazzed-up lately with a lot of mosaic, neon, and silver ottomans that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Studio 54. In opposite corners, the kiosks of 5fm and Metro blast forth and you can see the jocks in their glass cages, yacking into those pro-looking microphones.
On February 16 Gillman had the good sense to invite the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys to be his studio guest, to promote Uys’s impending, pre-election Ballot Bus campaign. Uys had brought his famous alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout to Johannesburg, from the small town of Darling where he now runs his creative life.
To start with, Gillman confessed that he once drove through Darling, but couldn’t find the station where Uys performs his plays. No problem, he just mistook it for the toilets, suggested Uys.
“What are the top five things we can expect from our budget?” Gillman asked.
“Condoms, without holes in them,” Uys answered, forgetting the other four.
It was a sparring session of two similarly sharp minds. As the radio host put it: “Evita and Gillman – together at last!”
Pieter-Dirk Uys and Evita Bezuidenhout are perfect partners for radio repartee. Uys, of course, has been doing impromptu comedy for so long that great one liners and perceptive off-the-cuff monologues are second nature to him now.
This particular morning, though, he was concentrating his energies on his impending task -launching Evita’s People’s Party into action, a month-long voter awareness excursion that will span over 60 towns. It’s Evita’s “personal act of atonement”, the official press release claims.
For this reason alone Uys has concocted some prize jokes: “Everybody must have a bar code (in their identity books) because Mandela is very sentimental about bars – he was behind them for 27 years.”
Keeping the kettle boiling, Gillman fed Evita the lines.
“Has a head of state ever refused to meet with you?” he asked.
“I once knitted Winne Mandela a toilet cover,” he answered, in the voice of his world famous drag, “but then I found out she didn’t have a toilet, out there in Brandfort.”
And, in reply to a question about the Battle of Blood River, Evita Bezuidenhout said: “Blood River did not exist. It was a braaivleis between the Afrikaners and the Zulus. Imagine it, a quarter of a million Buthelezis without cellphones …”
Evita claims she is the most famous white woman in South Africa, an accolade not many South African men can confidently bestow on themselves.
More than a relic of apartheid, the drag character is a survivor of the defunct system that, once upon a time, threatened her very existence – even if she was just fiction from the start.
It’s quite obvious why, a week after addressing Parliament, Uys’s creation has taken it upon herself to encourage people to vote.
Mark Gillman’s breakfast show is on 5fm on weekdays from 6am to 9am. Evita’s Ballot Bus will be in Paarl and Bellville on February 22, in Laingsburg and Beaufort West on February 23, in De Aar and Kimberly on February 24, in Potchefstroom on February 25 and in Benoni on February 26. For information call 083 326-2546 or 083 263-6991.