Occasionally you happen upon a gem of television that makes all the other dross so much more insignificant. Such was the case in a half-hour documentary on e.tv last week, called JG Strijdom is Very, Very Dead: a faultlessly ironic examination of life around the gargantuan bronze head of “The Lion of the North”, which still glares strenuously across Strijdom Plein in Pretoria.
With its nearby fountain, topped by prancing horses, the Strijdom head would have turned the fhrer’s arse green with envy. As an example of fascist gigantean art, this one is of impeccable Nuremberg banality. Oddly, it has undergone a sort of second incarnation, among those who now daily settle the great marble square in front of the State Theatre. This is the hawker community, the pavement musicians and hustlers, for whom the Strijdom head serves an oblique satirical purpose. They find it ludicrous and some confess to being quite fond of it.
The documentary juxtaposed an ebullient street-market life with unanticipated polar inversions: short visits to the State Theatre’s ballet and opera rehearsals. But best of all were two characters: a street photographer who daily sets up his life- size cut-out of Mr Mandela in front of the Strijdom head, the other a bitterbek wrinkly who spends her pension feeding the numerous stray cats that inhabit the square. Each was a figure out of one of those insanely funny Jacques Tati films. Written and directed by Pule Diphare and with the always superb photography of Clifford Bestall, this should take an award.
Last Sunday, the second of two SABC3 Xpressions programmes under the title Apostles of Civilized Vice was aired. Zackie Achmat was both author and director of these documentaries about homosexuality in South Africa – more particularly an examination of society’s frequently horrified responses, over about the last 100 years, to the homosexualists in its midst. (No, I’m not a pompous straight misunderstanding things. That’s Ian McKellen’s preferred word.)
There is always peril in programmes of this configuration, where factual record is spiced up with dramatised vignettes. The programmes often can’t make up their minds what they are supposed to be and end up like this one did, looking like journalism cross-dressed as historical drama. In these two programmes quite a few imaginary reconstructions were implanted among the recollection and comment. These miniatures, as poignant as they always were, tended to disable the character of the piece. It would have read far stronger without them.
Quite often the vignettes were steeply manipulative, as in the instance of the dramatised confrontation between Rene Liddicoat – a 1960s academic and overt homophile – and a member of a parliamentary inquisition. Here the dice were so heavily loaded that the insert discarded its credibility within the first 20 seconds. Liddicoat was brightly lit, articulate, whereas her inquisitor was kept in minatory shadows and played his part like the sneering, two-dimensional villain of a Victorian melodrama. The bias was about as subtle as a kick in the mouth.
The direction of these two programmes indulged in far too many televisual mannerisms, all manner of distracting effects. I have no way of knowing where and how, but the sound quality in the second programme was quite appalling. I tried the MultiChoice satellite, the SABC’s own digital satellite and the direct terrestrial signal. All three had dreadful sibilance distortion.
To close, an amiable response to the SABC’s hilarious full-page self- congratulatory advert in last Sunday’s newspapers, the one headlined “THE SABC A GREAT SUCCESS”. (Their lack of punctuation. And all it needed was a question mark.) I particularly liked the corporation’s defence of the recent whitewash of alleged SABC financial iniquities, concocted, as you may remember, by a task-team consisting almost entirely of SABC board members. A bit like appointing Colonel Sanders to promote the rights of chickens.
The Mail & Guardian got a loving mention in the SABC advert and so, on behalf of all the liars and sloppy distorters who comprise this newspaper’s workforce, the following information is offered gratis to the SABC news department.
The Helderberg aircraft accident took the lives of 159 people, not “over 200” as reported in a main SABC3 news bulletin last week. The crash occurred on November 28 1987, a little less vague than “in the late Eighties”, which was as close as the Snuki Zikalala (PhD Bulgaria) team could get it.
Please inscribe these petty details in the SABC newsroom reference files. Obviously there’s no charge to a respectable old scholar like you, Snuki.