Matthew Krouse Down the tube
South Africa loves Going Up. The comedy’s ratings reflect its committed following, even though its airing time is unfavourable to its content. It shows on SABC1 at 7pm, on Saturday nights when everybody is either out or getting there. Of course it would sit more comfortably at the end of a working day, a pep to the midweek blues.
Episode one of the fourth series took off on July 3, and exceeded all expectations. In the month it’s been playing, viewership ratings indicate that the programme is watched by well over a million determined weekend homebodies.
The producers at Penguin Films must be delighted. Looking at the content, though, one wonders whether they can be entirely satisfied that their product is problem free, for Going Up has some dents that cannot be ignored.
Even though it’s designed to be a questioning, up-to-the-minute comedy, the series resonates with boring prejudice. Much of the humour hints that its scriptwriters are clutching at some really sour old grapes.
The targets Going Up hits on are stock, suburban gripes: an irrational view of crime, unquestioning resentment of affirmative action, suspicion of corruption and judgment of moral decay. Because of the weight these issues are given, the human element in the programme lacks dynamism. Generally, the characters tend to assume archaic, unswerving positions in the dealings that go on in the law firm Cluver, Tsaba and Associate.
Episode five on July 31, called Playthings, is a case in point. Dealing with the opening of a sex shop in the city, it treats the advent of porn with the kind of eye-rolling shock and horror one would expect of primary-school children. The point of the humour is about 30 years out of date.
In Playthings the gags arise entirely from the precept that, in a respectable legal firm like Cluver’s, the mere mention of sex is a cardinal sin. This gives great opening to crass innuendo – with the actors having a jolly time of punning on phrases such as “sorry, Jabu cannot come right now”.
A foreigner goes for legal advice, intending to open his sex store in the city. Simultaneously two conservative black women from an organisation called Mothers Opposing Perverts approach the same lawyers to help them clamp down on vice. Ultimately they all meet for a showdown in which good, old- fashioned morality triumphs. Talk about a missed opportunity. The writers haven’t gotten together a single insightful observation about the genuine humour and pathos in the sex industry today.
The previous week’s episode, called The Job Hopper, was similarly dumbed down. This time the villain was the stereotypical black shirker, riding the affirmative action wave. As it wore on, the programme looked suspiciously like a plot to expose a character the mostly-white scriptwriters despise. It seemed agenda-ridden to say the least.
It’s a great pity that the creative groundwork of Going Up is so weak, because the formula of the drama is constructed to allow debate. The notion is that in the legal firm there are two consulting rooms, with individuals tackling problems that will ultimately be solved as they confront each other in the practice’s meeting space.
The mission of the series, then, is to illustrate the sense of commonality in human pursuit. This is somehow forsaken in the writing that tends to get too caught up in trying to make moral sense of situations that cannot be resolved as neatly as the writers would have liked. As a result of all this pitting good against bad, one is left with a series that sits in heavy judgment of the dilemmas normal South Africans face, instead of allowing everyone an equal, legitimate voice.
Looking at the writing team – Neil McCarthy, Maralin Vanrenen, Barbara Rubin, Gilda Blacher, Adrian Galley, Nkensane Manganye and Ronnie Goldberg – one will observe some of the brightest flames around. Sorry chaps, not good enough.
The Going Up press release claims it’s doing well in Canada and Switzerland. Surprise, surprise – the puerile watch television all over the world.