Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
It would seem that with the arrival in its boardrooms of the Rembrandt group, e.tv has had a welcome injection of hard cash. It would seem also that, like the unexpected benefice of a wealthy relative’s will, all the delicious lolly is being spent like there’s no tomorrow.
The first signs of Uncle Rupert’s bonanza are starting to appear in public, in the shape of, so far, two local sitcoms which have lifted this undervalued art form to new depths. (I’ve heard there’s a third one floating around but I’m not going to go looking for it. Not on purpose.)
The productions are entitled Big Okes and Save Our Souls (SOS). The quickest way to describe these sitcoms would be as companion pieces to The Toasty Show but without The Toasty Show’s innate sophistication and elegance.
Both programmes kicked off with a forthright warning which made no bones about the quality of scintillating capriccio about to follow. It was all there in four terrifying words: “Created by Roberta Durrant”. (After these two series they’ll probably design a new triangle containing the letters PGTITHABTTS – Parental Guidance Totally Inadequate, Try Hurling a Brick Through the Screen.)
Viewers had better learn the programmes’ names because that’s going to be the only way they’ll tell one from the other. The two shows use what appears to be the same set, but with different dressing and furniture. More or less the same applies to the characters. When it comes to the scripts, Roberta must have saved quite a bit on her budget. All the actors had to do was scrape the plots and lines off the bottom of their shoes.
Produced in Roberta’s personal creative cistern, Penguin Films, a company whose previous triumphs include the Dennis Davis Intellectual Superbowl, Future Imperfect, and which is now being used as a deep drainage system for South Africa’s latent comedic talents. At this stage we can only hope that no one tries to recycle each episode as it sloshes down. These two new e.tv sitcoms inscribe their names in what will become a venerable canon. Well worth a rumoured patronage of many millions of tobacco booty.
Quite by chance I am now in possession of what will quite soon be a priceless televisual artefact. As I was watching the update of Dial M for Murder on M-Net, I recorded last Sunday’s SABC3 Newshour.
It is a classic of its kind, 60 minutes of excruciatingly funny entertainment. It contains several glorious examples of crude camera-work, of distorted sound, of every technical balls-up available. The crude grammar and solecisms of the studio news items have seldom been so dense; they come at you in a solid stream. The inserts are the best of all and include a five-minute “Special Abortion Report” from Mia Malan – the big cellulite-friendly one who looks like an escapee from South Park. She gives another of her hilarious impersonations of “Plaasjaap Engels”: “Woman’s whums is most precious of all to her.”
I’ve broken off the over-recording tab at the back of the tape and intend having this one reproduced on video cassettes. I will offer these for sale, proceeds to the Save Pallo Fund.
To introduce their news bulletins, BBC World recently have come up with a new set of visually jangling billboards. It’s all dislocational, whirling circles, spinning galaxies, electronic warning sirens, all manner of neurotic computer-generated graphics. The newsreaders have to read their opening headlines over a demented jungle disco beat. Before any bulletin gets under way, viewers have to sit through about two minutes of presentational wanking.
And BBC World programmes, themselves, are getting shorter by the day, it would seem for no other reason than to make space for all the above. Things invariably kick off five or six minutes late. They end with the same amount to spare so that the artistic visual effects and graphics department can have another toss. As old Vance Packard warned, the packaging is taking over the product.
As much as we will all miss her, Tumi Makgabo must make up her mind whether she’s going off to Atlanta and her new job with CNN or not. The touching farewell parties and interviews are long since gone, the magazine articles wishing her well grow yellow on the shelves, throats are cracked dry with bon voyages.
Yet every other evening there she still is, bewitching and occult but still, very much still here.
Has it all fallen through?