Robert Kirby Channel vision
‘The petrol price has gone up with 60c since the beginning of the year. If it will reach the R3 mark at the end of the year …” intones SABC television news reporter Joanne Roodt.
“One of eight people accused are being charged,” whines Nadia Levin from deep inside the tornado-chic of her latest hairstyle. Close on her heels is an SABC field reporter who tells of someone’s assets having been “four-feeted”. This is hastily corrected and in the next bulletin someone else’s assets have been “confisticated”. Here’s another elegant lode: “The persons found in the possessive of the drugs can be full prosecuted.”
Your first reaction to a grammatical mess like this is often anger. But, minute by minute, as the examples rack up in the average SABC news bulletin, the emotion gradually shifts through embarrassment and pity, and ends up 180 from where it began. At this stage you remember Mr Byron’s helpful comment: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘Tis that I may not weep.”
What is quite clear is that the SABC no longer comprehends the scope of its influence on language. Somewhere along the bucking “transformation” line the corporation shook itself free of its obligations in this wise. There has to be some reason for the persistent use of gutter English in SABC news bulletins – if not a calculated decision. Perhaps the SABC board has elected to ignore linguistic standards in favour of making everything a lot less stressful for the semi-literates who nowadays write the SABC English news and the sub-literates who report it.
As horrifying as the notion is, I can understand why the SABC has decided to lower its cerebral sights, to become more popular, more dolt-friendly. It’s called “dumbing down” and is currently very popular in broadcasting. Under a recent chair, even that dented old battleship, the BBC, has been forced to dumb down. The reason broadcasters do this is that they want both to attract as many viewers and listeners as possible and, at the same time, put gleam to their democratic feathers.
In the broadcasting business dumbing down entails a usually gradual purging from transmissions of demanding stuff like abstract thought, individual opinion, imagination and, most of all, contention. It’s a bit like mass- circulation newspapers, where they have computer programmes to pounce on and replace any words that do not occur in a prescribed fool’s vocabulary. Eventually dumbing down works like a kind of inverted King Midas in that everything it touches slowly turns to shit. It follows therefore that the reason big broadcasting corporations like the SABC and the BBC dumb down is because they believe that the thicker the shit they transmit, the more flies will be attracted to their end of the waveband. The fact that these will be extremely stupid flies does not matter. It’s numbers they’re after, not quality.
This could be the real reason the SABC news department doesn’t bother with anything more advanced than its crude imitations of English. After all, thousands of tonnes of gold were hauled out of a cruel earth with the help of Fanagalo. Why not have a similar breed of cretin’s English to report the results of all this plundering? Warmed in his Heroes’ Acre grave, Hendrik Frans spins smugly on. At the SABC news department his tenets of “appropriate education” for the South African majority are yet honoured.
Mark you, as far as its usage of English is concerned, to reach a linguistically deficient state in alignment with the bulk of other SABC endeavours, the SABC news department would, in fact, have to dumb up.
Watching Michael Parkinson interview the inimitable Dame Edna Everage (BBC Prime), I realised just what a long shelf-life she’s had. In London’s Establishment Club in the mid-Sixties I saw Barry Humphries in early try-outs of both Dame Edna and his other immortal satirical creation, the passionately vulgar, beer-swilling, egg- and gravy-stained Sir Les Patterson, Australian cultural ambassador to the court of St James.
Dame Edna is and will remain the last word in drag acts, simply because she actually isn’t one. Humphries made that shift a long time ago. Both Dame Edna and Sir Les are distinct and independent personalities. They own themselves, inhabit entirely separate worlds. They are not alter egos, but disguised extensions of the Humphries personality.
This has always been the defining trick of great comic invention.