Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
I confess happily to being an ardent South Park fan. There can be no other television programme, of whatever form or theme, which has stretched the limits of tolerance quite as far as this one has. Dreamed up by two high school boys and pushed into reality by them as soon as they left school, South Park has developed into outrageous and often corrosive satire and satire of any specific gravity isn’t something the medium of television usually nurtures. True, there have been exceptions to this general rule, like the early Sixties rash of television satire on the BBC, led by That Was the Week That Was. But you won’t find anything today, even on British television, which is nearly as biting and relevant as those were.
South Park’s targets are populist myth along with the usually stultifying moral processes of suburbia; most especially traditional religious attitudes come in for a pasting. The standard reaction to the South Park excesses in language, imagery and general abrogations of bourgeois “good taste”, is often simply of disgust. Which isn’t surprising really. Not a lot of cartoon series have pushed the envelope far enough to have a talking and singing turd as a character. Mr Hankey, the Christmas poo, is a South Park regular (sorry), merrily bouncing around leaving little skid marks wherever he touches.
Hankey lives in a nearby sewer where he can be found playing a giant Gothic church organ and comes up to surface to pop out of the bowl and help expand the Yuletide message in itself an oblique comment. In his latest excursion Mr Hankey sat in an armchair in front of a fireplace and introduced his selection of “Christmas Specials”. These included a visit to a cartoon Hades where a little Hitler sang wistfully about not getting a present, and where a huge and decidedly amiable devil led an upbeat production number called Christmas Time in Hell.
Among other famous residents in this inferno were Jeffrey Dahmer, a smirking, green-haired, energetically bonking Princess Diana (it would seem nothing much has changed for her), all the dead members of the Kennedy clan, John Lennon and a few other popular idols.
Nor will you find many television programmes, however adult they claim to be, which go quite as far as to depict a caricature Jesus Christ as the host of his own talk show. “We’ll be taking your calls on the subject of my sermon on the mount just after these commercial messages.”
South Park treads the borderline and its propositions are gloriously cynical. Set mainly around the schoolhouse, a recent episode concentrated on Mr Garrison, the teacher with a glove-puppet permanently fixed to his right hand. Garrison is forced to revisit the central crisis of his own childhood; a feeling of cruel emotional deprivation as a result of his never having been abused by his father. Again the satirical revocation is perfectly aimed: these days having had a brutalised childhood has become de rigueur for any fast-lane entertainment celebrity.
Just how South Park not only came into being but, more compellingly, how it has managed to snub the pinch-lipped arbiters of big-time television, is a study in itself. M-Net is showing the latest series on Wednesday evenings at or about 10.15pm.
South Park is broadcast late in the evening. Not so the intended broadcast on SABC1 (during an episode of Soul Buddyz at 6.30pm on December 26) of a so-called sex-education programme aimed, according to the SABC handouts, at eight- to 12-year-olds. This programme will be broadcast in the early evening and, by means of animation, will explain in graphic detail the processes of human reproduction. There will be anatomical drawings of the sexual organs and the programme will explain things like breasts, erections, pubic hair and menstruation in explicit terms.
I wonder what stunningly arrogant soul it is in the SABC who decides just what all young children should be shown in these regards. Surely in matters of this nature, such decisions rest in the purview of parents. It is a specifically parental decision as to when and how to explain the facts of life to children and for very obvious reasons. Children are individuals and in matters like this their particular reactions need to be assessed and given regard.
These parental determinations should not unilaterally be abrogated by some ambitious producer who believes his or her sentiments are paramount.
Someone of responsibility in the SABC should see this essentially sensationalist thing is not aired.