Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION
Against my better judgement and the advice of several friends I had a look at the newest ordeal to have sprung from the SABC’s light entertainment division: Greed, or the “neetch for greetch” as its presenter, Revin John, would have it. At first I thought there was something wrong with his microphone and then realised that it was Revin himself. In his efforts to replicate the Sol Kerzner version of mid-Atlantic English, Mr John has forgotten how to sound Ds and Ts, so he says things like “tchwenty thousantch rantch” and “you ortch tchu tchake itch”. It’s quite amusing for a while but then you start to feel a sense of cold pity quickly superimposed by the neetch for M-Netch.
I say against my better judgement because I had seen some of the series of in-your-face Greed commercials. They are very well made in that they accurately reflect the cornucopian crudity of the show and its presentation. Mr John appears in these commercials and, as in the show itself, exhibits all the charm and unforced bonhomie of a sack of turnips (avid turnip lovers please do not write in contesting this analogy).
To say that Greed moves slowly is to overstate. It hardly moves at all. The most systemic of the greed involved is clearly that of the show itself, so designed as to keep the contestants as far away from the boodle as possible. The fewer the questions, the fewer the payout bucks.
Greed is a conspicuous rip-off of what is the decidedly greener crass on the other side of the fence, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Greed’s loudly trumpeted doubling of the ultimate stake is also a bit of a come-on. At best the five contestants would end up with R400?000 each. Best leave this one alone.
It was encouraging to see the improvement in the overall matric results for 2000 but SABC television news so overplayed the story they effectively cast doubt on its credibility. In a half-hour bulletin they devoted no less than 24 minutes to it, much of which was a generalised crowing about how telling the new system has been and, hence, an ill-disguised promotion for the ruling political party plus, of course, the ritual spit in the eye of apartheid. Endlessly sweet are the uses of past adversity. Here they went to the extent of visiting an empty classroom in a rural school, which teaches in Afrikaans and where none of the pupils passed matric. The reporter then stated that the use of the Afrikaans language “keeps pupils away”.
Now that’s about as close to hate speech as you would want to get; what is more, it rather puts to mockery the fact that many of the top achievers in the matric examinations were from Afrikaans-medium schools. Why the SABC in general, and its news departments in particular, continue with their dedicated propagation of racial and social polarisation, the ceaseless aggravation of political dilemma, is one of the saddest facts in the young democracy. The corporation, with its utter paucity of national responsibility, is a sore disgrace. In the BBC’s Hardtalk series last week it ran an elderly interview with Jerry Springer, he of the trenchmouth television show. All shy and self-effacing, Springer offered an interesting justification for his show. According to him the show is not just what it looks like, a sluice gate for the excretion of mobile-home carnal excitements. Rather its principal function is to fulfil constitutional guarantees for its participants. These people have a right to say what they feel, said Jerry, while Tim Sebastian nodded meaningfully.
So, we may assume, does the bear own an inalienable right to shit in the woods. To show him doing so on television neither underwrites nor protects his right; it merely brings the smell a lot closer. Sebastian, as is his habit, fell for Mr Springer’s genial slap and tickle and missed a prime opportunity to ask some penetrating questions about the way shows like Mr Springer’s are eroding what bitterly won standards remain in commercial television. For all his demure pleadings about running a mildly offbeat circus, Springer is, in reality, of the invidious and growing breed of television pornographers. His alibis align closely with every other of that kind, the “someone has to do it” defence.
That Sebastian didn’t pick up on this most obvious of contentions shows again what a wildly overrated and biased interviewer he is.