Robert Kirby Channel Vision
With the Rugby World Cup under way, it’s fairly certain where most television sets will be pointing these next six weeks. At this stage all that deserves comment is the lumbering opening ceremony of the tournament. Wales should hang its national head in shame – followed by the public lopping-off of several other heads.
They should do it right there at the scene of the crime, the magnificent new Cardiff Arms Park-cum-Millennium stadium. Line up all the conceptualisers, organisers, participants – especially that abominable brass band. A clean execution to reward a horrendously maladroit one. There can be few international showpieces as dull, as hopelessly ill-conceived and managed as this one was. There are thousands and thousands of more imaginative slag-heaps standing around in Wales. They should have used one of those.
Thanks to the miracle of television, there we all were, at the fabulous new ground, joining the 70 000 bellowing spectators. Millions upon millions of viewers. How did the Cardiff organisers respond? They sent some soldiers rushing on to the field carrying complicated lengths of red metal piping. These were assembled to become what first looked like a gigantic piece of garden furniture, but which eventually turned out to be a Welsh dragon – a tubular conception, as it were. So profoundly emblematic this structure, it was erected in twilight at one side of the field and then left there to rust. A few fireworks were let off around the tubular dragon’s bottom and shortly afterwards even more soldiers rushed on and took it apart again.
While all this was going on, the field’s central platform was visited by a selection of vocal artists ranging from a glottally disadvantaged pop group, through Shirley Bassey (yes, she’s still alive) to an urban bard who specialises in badly scanned humorous doggerel. About the only thing they got right was inviting the Prince of Wales to round off the show. Clearly, if you are going to have an embarrassment of this magnitude, you need to have it aptly represented.
What the rest of the World Cup television rugby has again revealed is the extent to which liquor salesmen will go to suckle their commercial needs. As you would have noticed in the broadcast of the South Africa/Scotland game, every try and conversion seemed to be sponsored by Guinness.
As a try went down in the corner, and before the players had picked themselves up, up popped a vast subtitle printed in between animated glasses of the product: “Now Put One Over The Bar!” – or some other devastating wordplay from the literary bounty-house of advertising copy.
The reason the Guinness lads pay lank bucks to do this is because, shrewd businessmen that they are, they wish to instil in people’s minds the entirely reasonable notion that drinking their product makes the drinker a part of the success and cheering surrounding the try. Better still, by showing pictures of beer bottles alongside sporting achievements, younger minds may be infiltrated with the entirely humane lie that drinking liquor not only signifies success in life, but is actually essential to it.
Those principled titans, South African Breweries, did exactly the same thing in a televised cricket series a few years ago. They ran something like 400 beer adverts across a five-day test – around eleven an hour – including a long one in which they assembled shots of wickets being tumbled, impossible catches being taken and fours smashed to the boundary. Intercut were shots of beer cans being opened, beer being poured, quaffed. And there are those of us who say the dop-stelsel is a thing of the past.
Still on the subject of advertising, may I extend my warmest congratulations to the Advertising Standards Authority for their splendid decision in banning that ultra- synthetic anti-rape television advert featuring Charlize Theron – no, not the Charlize Theron at the Parow Vehicle Licencing and Test Centre, the big Hollywood star Charlize Theron.
Under the tutelage of voluptuous Jane Raphaely, Mistress Theron sounded off provocatively on the subject of rape. Whether she’s been successful in reducing the incidence of this crime is not, unfortunately, quantifiable. What Theron did do, though, is ratify a suspicion I’ve long had: that among the most pernicious insults to the intelligence of South African middle-class women, are those dished to them on a regular basis by South African women’s magazines.
This advert was right off the cover of one of those glossies.