Matthew Krouse Down the tube
Late-night programming took a strange turn last weekend with the showing of two pilot sessions of the new Dead Time slot on e.tv. The bizarre content of the proposed late- night station erupted in a blaze of glory in the wee hours of Saturday July 10 and Sunday July 11.
It must have filled any viewers over the age of 30 with mixed feelings of deep regret and fear: regret at not being young enough to fully appreciate the wayward humour on offer, and fear of what the future of entertainment might be. It was a moment tailor-made for white youth – a haphazard conglomerate of irreverence, fashion statements and music. It began with a run of fillers that were in essence the showpiece that Jo’burg’s Channel 69, the producer, had gotten together for the broadcast.
The first posed the question: “How to watch Dead Time when you’re blind?” What followed was a shot of a blind youth on a couch, a sexy girl before him. He reached out and fondled her. The meaning was clear: the blind must feel Dead Time with their hands.
In a later filler a typographic statement, “Viewers have been watching television the wrong way”, was accompanied by a shot of someone bound and gagged. Another showed an ape urinating into its own mouth.
These set the tone for the rest.
In a series of funny items, stand-up comedians were shown in what had at some stage been Dead Time auditions for upcoming slots. An unknown pretty boy satirised well-known commercials, coughing and growling his way through a cigarette advert. Somewhat better-known, comedian David Kau sent up affluent black youths who spend their lives socialising via their cellphones. Way after midnight, when Kau pulled some tired old impersonations of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela out of his hat, this reviewer began to nod off.
But the most bizarre insert was to follow. In what proposes to be an ongoing insert called Pros and Cons, a crew appeared disguised as a medi-cal team, sent by the authorities to inform an unknowing young couple, who were to be married a week later, that they were suffering from a rare virus. Inevitably, their infection would mean that the couple would lose all sexual desire for each other.
Surrounded by supposed medical experts, and covered in white talcum, the pair were taken through some stringent physical tests – stupid things like the blowing up of balloons, after which their house was placed under quarantine. All this was shot with the permission of the girl’s parents, who hovered naughtily in the background.
An entirely useless exercise, Pros and Cons is fascinating in its expos of the lengths people will go to to inflict an acceptable level of cruelty on others.
Earlier, the station had done what it had originally intended to do: show locally made short films. One, called Apartment 19 and made in the United States by South African Paul Whitty, dealt with a young couple who rent an apartment from a deranged landlord who manipulates his tenants into bumping each other off.
While Apartment 19 is no masterpiece, its presence is indicative of the gap that Channel 69 wishes to open for the showing of products made by the burgeoning film set.
Interspersed with this adventurous content that really has no other place on the airwaves, were music videos, over which health tips appeared. “Sharing needles causes hepatitis,” one read. Popular youth activities like snowboarding and rave dancing completed the pilot, spiced up with a Disney-type cartoon, the classic Coyote.
At the time of broadcast this was the material available to Channel 69. The producers, however, intend introducing a live entertainment element to the programme by linking the broadcast up to popular late night programmes on youth-oriented radio channels, such as Yfm.