Robert Kirby Channel Vision
I thought I might introduce my brand new assignment as the Mail & Guardian’s television ruminant with a merry thought from Mr Theo Erasmus. Mr Erasmus – or Thunderbox Theo as he’s known to his professional intimates – is general manager of SABC3. According to rumour, Theo earned this moniker from his habit of going all frothy around the colon when anything disagrees with him.
Example: a paragraph from a crumpled letter Thunderbox sent to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, griping about my continued presence on that morally patient body. Hyperbole firmly clenched in his teeth, Thunderbox wrote:
“We concede that the readers of a publication such as the Financial Mail may discount such vitriolic attacks on this channel and the SABC as the smug subjectivity of poison-pen journalism and that some might even be vaguely amused by it. However, we are concerned about the effect this has on our staff; on creative people doing a splendid job. Such unjustifiably acrimonious, destructive criticism has a demoralising effect, which can only be to the detriment of the SABC and the South African television industry as a whole.”
And there you were, thinking humble television critics are naught but chaff in a gale. You were wrong. With a twitch of our toxic keyboards we are capable of demoralising entire industries. Never undervalue us.
Introductions over, let me move on and take a look at the newest labour of one of the SABC’s most talented curiosities, Mr Phil Molefe, an editor-in-chief in the SABC news department. When he’s not busy expelling colonialist debris like Max du Preez, Phil gets his creative rocks off doing brilliant impersonations of how Idi Amin would have looked as a television interviewer.
Phil reserves this persona for the really important stuff. In fact the last time I saw him was in late May this year, when he and that gifted weepie, Antjie Krog, had one last desperate public lick at Mr Mandela. Last Sunday, in his latest appearance, Phil conducted a quite wonderfully bizarre long-distance interview with Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi which, if nothing else, showed just how far the well- practised tongue can stretch. The encounter went on for well over half an hour, interrupted every 10 minutes by the duty newsreader whose task it was to apologise for the poor sound and reassure us that we were still tuned in to the SABC.
Indeed, we might well have wondered. At one end was Phil Molefe slowly reading a set of guzzle-arse questions (“And now, Colonel Gadaffi, please tell us how you so nobly undertook the mammoth task of keeping prices of tea and bread down for the millions of your gratefully adoring people who for so long have suffered under the criminal sanctions of the American money- gods”); on the other, the lovable dusty colonel, looking like he’d just been thrown off a Star Wars set.
Abandoning his home tent for this interview, Gadaffi had elected to sit in front of some shelves of impressive looking books, impatiently drumming his fingers on the desk while Phil drooled on. To every three words the colonel uttered in response, his interpreter added another 300 from a nearby echo-chamber. The net result was a sort of ponderous idiot’s burlesque, some Samuel Beckett reject about metaphrastic political teleology. Nay, I make perhaps too much of this. It was probably just constipation.
There you are, Theo. Let’s hope the above unsolicited encomia will cast our tortured relationship adrift on more amiable waters. As the witch said to the toad, dropping him into the cauldron: “You’ll be tastier boiled than baked.”