Robert Kirby Channel Vision
Whether e.tv is going to survive is, of course, anybody’s guess. A lot of people think it should, usually on the grounds that e.tv is a necessary evil, an independent entity against which the SABC and M-Net may be assessed.
This is nonsense. The one thing SABC television has never lacked is its native ability to be bad all on its own. It needs no lessons on how to look and sound fifth- rate. It’s like one of those self- lubricating boils you used to get on your neck soon after puberty set in. You didn’t need to compare it with those of your schoolmates. It was yucky and humiliating all by itself.
As for M-Net, well no one with a nominally serious mind could believe that e.tv represents any danger whatsoever to them. The real truth is that e.tv, the SABC and M-Net are actually in cahoots. Each one is an distinct electronic stage in the autumnal life cycle of low-grade American television programmes. As they reach their mid-20s, a great many of these programme organisms migrate to South African television stations. All those circa 1975 sitcoms, soapies, cop-series, human interest dramas and game shows first wither on the M-Net vine. Then they move on to the SABC where, according to how frail and sickly they are, they get apportioned to the various channels. After that they all limp off to e.tv to die in shame.
The only real threat e.tv poses, therefore, is territorial. This is because, since the mid-1970s, the SABC has carefully been building up a shit-for-brains audience base. It’s been a frontal 25-year dumbing- down process and it has succeeded in creating a great, happily grinning wedge of the population, each member of it wielding what American social psychologists call “a common trailer-park mentality”. Apparently you don’t have to actually live in a trailer-park to acquire a common trailer- park mentality. It’s an entirely abstract blessing. Just pay your television licence fee regularly and a CTPM will grow on you automatically. Just like the boils did.
Thanks almost entirely to the SABC – though some credit should rightfully be given to Independent Newspapers – South Africa now has a devoutly stupid but otherwise commercially exploitable bottom- end social stratum, wide open for market invasion. It is these limp-brained millions which e.tv now regards with envy. Quite rightly the SABC deeply fears and resents this, which is why they are currently going full out to degrade their audience even further.
But that’s the subject of a future column. For the rest of this one I want to stick to e.tv. While it’s pretty clear e.tv buy their programmes by the kilo – like bookshops where they weigh your purchases – this provides no acceptable alibi for the abysmal level of the “local content” on the e.tv roster.
Have a look at just one of e.tv’s home- grown late-evening specials. It’s called Mainly for Men, a show which once and for all explodes the myth that “real” men have any interests outside 4x4s, hangover remedies and enormous flabby tits. To service the latter infatuation this e.tv programme recently went all hugger-mugger with Hustler magazine, plundering Joe Theron’s archives for a selection of terrifying 18-pounders. How classy can they get?
Another local gem is e.tv news, principally a forum for items about bottled three-headed Vietnamese foetuses, loving investigations of pools of blood, updates from the urogenital front – e.tv news should be subtitled: “All the fouls of the air.” These news bulletins are often read by a fellow called San Reddy. I’m quite sure Mr Reddy is a pleasant enough chap, but something very urgently needs to be done about his elocution. He sounds as if he’s publicly test-driving a new and imaginative form of spoken English in which all unnecessary vowels and consonants are left out.
A sentence, “In a function in the Parliament buildings President Mbeki spoke in honour of Oliver Tambo’s great political contributions”, comes out via Reddy as: “Inner fuck-shin parmt blings Pren Becky poke nonner Ovamvbos grey tick ablutions.” Someone should tell San either to speak slower or go and get his tongue pumped up. He’s setting a terrible example to the young.
For the moment that about wraps up these pleasant reflections on our new free-to-air channel. See you at Tabloid.