Matthew Krouse Down the tube
`No politicians behind desks and no talking heads,” promise the producers of Real Lives, e.tv’s new 13-part documentary series aired on Wednesdays at 9pm.
The first two episodes, now shown, have indeed been free of laboured political invective and emotional commentary – proving what light relief a non-judgmental approach to actuality can be.
Of course, it’s only the American television formula that has brought about the need for expert advice about everything from flatulence to divorce. One need only think of how Oprah Winfrey parades so-called authorities to offer suspicious audiences the assurance that what certain “other” groups experience in life, is actually all right.
The initial episodes of Real Lives, on March 3 and 9, dealt with virginity testing and township gambling. Topics far removed from the real lives of the two white women who directed the episodes.
The first was directed by Nadine Zylstra. Its title, The House on Mpanza Road, refers to a block of flats in rural KwaZulu-Natal where an elderly virginity inspector lives alongside two young women with first hand experience of the ritual itself.
The second, directed by Alette Schoon and called The Roll of the Dice, dealt with the men of Soweto who supplement their incomes with earnings from street corner gambling bouts.
As a form of documentary, coming from the outside and looking in, both episodes steered clear of making people’s real experiences appear too exotic. Since viewers can only be subjective, it’s great that the series’s approach allows one the liberty of ambivalence, free from postulation.
An intimate ritual like virginity testing, from which girls graduate with a certificate, was made to look like a reasonable deterrent to HIV infection and child abuse in difficult conditions.
On the flipside, a young woman who had once failed such a test in a year when she was pregnant, was interviewed. Her community wasn’t entirely without compassion, though, and she still lived on Mpanza Road. But I must confess I felt a little uncomfortable when informed that, had the family of the child’s father not paid “damages”, she would have been an outcast today.
The second episode followed a doctor who had grown up in Soweto, and had made so good out of gambling that he had moved with his family to a mansion in the white suburbs.
While he regularly returns to Soweto to throw the dice, he now feels like an exile, materially facilitated but estranged from his roots.
It is these small contradictions that present some unexpected surprises, lending credence to the series’s name. The title bears sad testimony to the fact that, in this country, our real lives are so far removed from one another that other people’s experiences often don’t seem real at all.
The upcoming episode on March 17 is Women in the Military, directed by Robbie Thorpe. A look at three vivacious young soldiers, its focus of interest will probably be the collision of different worlds – when conservative young Afrikaners have to share the shower block with former members of MK.
Following in the wake of their previous work – Ordinary People and Ghetto Diaries – Mail & Guardian Television has found enough fascinating subject matter to warrant yet another round on the same idea.
Somehow we never tire of snooping about, to get a glimpse of how the other half really is.