Matthew Krouse : Down the tube
You don’t have to be as deep as Mike Lipkin to know that people spend a lot of their weekends in bed, in front of the television – particularly the early mornings, when those with kids probably get the worst end of a cute, co-parenting romp.
If you have kids, you probably know they need some sort of diversion to keep them occupied while you savour your rest. But if you don’t have kids, and you don’t particularly care for talking animals, you may as well hire a video for your mindless morning in bed.
The lowlight of the Saturday funnies must be Timon and Pumba, the warthog and his buddy whose Swahili slogan, “Hakuna matata,” can only be interpreted as: “Be as rotten as you like to the poor African animals – they don’t feel a thing.”
Does anybody still care for Winnie the Pooh, Aladdin or The Smurfs? Somehow we still have them, although they just happen to be the most politically incorrect relics of days gone by.
While weekend viewing must be a drag for those with tiny kids, during weekdays things for babies hot up a degree. Most observers will probably know that SABC Education made Yizo Yizo, but that’s not all they do.
Apart from priming township youths for a life of violence and crime, they manufacture a blueprint for the inclusion of public broadcasting into the curriculum of the country’s schools.
With the recent launch of School TV, SABC has unleashed the results of a process, two years in the planning, to take educational television to schools in the remotest corners of the country.
The seminal stages are called the 90 Schools Pilot Project – 10 schools in each province will be the initial beneficiaries. The luckiest schools, with the unluckiest histories, will get free televisions and video machines. Corporate donations have already made 20 machines available, and the corporation is seeking a donor to help them out with a few more.
If all goes well, teachers will be able to use SABC2 broadcasts from Monday to Friday, from 10am in the morning until noon, to facilitate classes from grade 0 to grade 3.
Programmes included in the scheme are pretty consistent, geared towards counting, care of pets and, of course, the ever fluffy Open Sesame that airs every day at 10am.
Certain measures have been taken to ensure that teachers get in on the deal, and a facilitator’s pack has been produced, complete with board games, posters and story books.
That’s all very well, but when the little Johnnies arrive home to be asked by their mommies, “What did you learn at school today?” some parents are obviously going to freak out when they get told: “We watched TV.”
There’s no way that the education department is going to facilitate everybody’s outlook on life. If the Yizo Yizo debate has taught anybody anything it’s this: let the people who don’t like what’s going on watch Agriforum instead. Perhaps they’re more in tune with the lancing of boils in the anuses of sheep.