Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
Even though it was two weeks ago, I feel I should respond in kind to the good- natured invective from Roberta Durrant which was published while I was taking a break from this column.
Roberta was complaining about a critical notice I gave to two of her searing new local tragedies, Big Okes and Save Our Souls (SOS) – currently exposing themselves on e.tv.
In the course of Roberta’s spirited response she pointed out that I am “old and doddering”, a description with which I have to agree. In fact it is this very mental antiquity which puts me in a position to recall, with great tenderness, the first time I met Roberta Durrant, back in the early Sixties when she was first exposing her talents to a grateful public. It is far too inspiring a parable not to be shared. It will also put Roberta’s recent letter in a more fluid perspective.
The year was 1969. I was presenting a dinner-theatre revue at Durban’s Edward hotel when, one Saturday morning, a fresh young Roberta pitched up and asked whether she could do an audition for me. In those days she called herself Roberta “Cookie” Badenhorst-Durrant.
She had prepared an audition piece, which she performed on the floor of my hotel room. It was a mime, its theme, quite appropriately, a seaside one. As I recall it, a young woman swims out to sea, dives down in the hope of becoming a mermaid. Something goes wrong and she gets turned into a jellyfish by mistake.
It was a very moving piece and the vision of Roberta-Cookie-Badenhorst- Durrant, in a lurid orange form-fitting body stocking, flopping about breathlessly on the rich Edward hotel carpeting, still haunts my grizzled mind. More especially since, unknown to Roberta, the body stocking had developed a small splitting of its seams, at what might be termed the very worst of places. Not at all revealing, I add gratefully, but nonetheless visually compelling. I became fixated on this triangular rent, hoping all the while that it would not open any further. The mime ended quite abruptly when, as I recall, Roberta ruptured something.
Despite this touching display of her talents I was unable to absorb Roberta into our cast. It was dinner-theatre and the hotel management flatly refused to have seafood on the stage. Also, we couldn’t fit all Roberta’s names on to the poster.
Roberta Durrant has, of course, stuck closely to her bio-marine cultural discourse and now heads a joint called Penguin Films. This is where the story picks up. As she boasts in her letter, Penguin Films has garnered no less than five contracts to “create” and produce local television sitcoms. I have to report that rumour flying around the grapevine says that these five represent a windfall of around R10-million.
Rumour of a peckier kind is also flying around and asks why all five lucrative contracts went to one and the same production house. There are lots of others out there, struggling to survive. I’m sure there’s a simple and honest answer to this, but until that answer is made we are left to unworthy speculation about monopolistic practices and so on.
If you’ve ever wondered what is truly
meant by “spin doctoring” you would have had the answer in the BBC documentary of the Nato/ Kosovo 78-day war – a programme aptly titled How the War Was Spun.
The documentary showed the often appalling inner workings of the “communications teams” and their manipulation of news coming out of the conflict, most especially around the incident when a convoy of Albanian refugees was bombed by mistake.
But when it comes to endogenous satire, little could beat this innovative explanation of “truth”, verbatim from General Wesley K Clark -supreme allied commander for Europe; a man with his finger on the button of more destructive power than the last two world wars put together.
“I don’t call them spin doctors. They were people who understood which pieces of information were important to provide the truth to the public. We discovered early on in the campaign, in fact we knew inherently, that the right way to fight a propaganda offensive is not with more propaganda, is not with a lie. It’s to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and as rapidly as possible. But you need some smart people who can tell you what piece of truth you’re looking for.”
Oh Orwell, where is thy sting?