Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
If it proves anything other than the fact that even drivel can be very gaudily wrapped, M-Net’s Cosmo Show has secondary merits. Anything which displays the incomparable Jane Raphaely touch, however remotely bestowed, is always good for a snigger. Cosmopolitan magazine is run by Raphaely’s daughter, Vanessa, and along with the television show, she continues to demonstrate an admirable continuity of the established family publishing tradition: superficiality in everything.
Cosmopolitan magazine has been described as porno with the little finger lifted. Most South Africans at one time or another have had a cautious dip in the chemically sweetened Raphaely pond; many do this in doctors’ waiting rooms where you see someone pick up a Cosmopolitan and try to hide it behind a Huisgenoot or a Cape Style, this so their fellow patients cannot see that they’re reading an article entitled Eight Steps to Becoming a Bedroom Siren or an editorial on the benefits of therapeutic family-group masturbation. Whole magazine chains can spring from that.
At long last the frothy Cosmopolitan philosophy has been extended to television. But being telly, Vanessa’s obviously been told to winch her creative team out of their crotches and pitch them, instead, at the digitally compressed yuppie market. In this brave endeavour Vanessa’s aim has been impeccable, the Cosmo Show has all the depth and insight of a deodorant commercial. Well done, girlie. You’ve scored an inner and your mother may quite justifiably be proud of you.
It seems we are never going to be rid of the mawkish legend attending the British royal family’s pet mattress-back, Princess Diana. BBC World last weekend attempted to cast some desperate illumination on Diana’s rapidly gathering obscurity. It was hard to decide whether the programme was being deliberately satirical. Entitled Diana’s Dresses, 45 minutes were given over to the story of what has happened to a selection of garments she wore during the tedious public occasion that formed her life. Most amusing were the people who actually bought from this array of rather garish party outfits, all the way from a breathtakingly mindless middle-aged Southern super-bimbo called Fontaine Minor, through a selection of mincing couturiers. Most pathetic of all appearances was by a truly grotesque cross-dresser, but even he didn’t match up to the penultimate comment from the dead enfanta herself. In a soft, broken voice she reflected on her selfless life’s mission: “Someone had to go out there and love the people.”
I must perforce respond to the letter in last week’s Mail & Guardian, from Dr Shereen Usdin, Soul City “advocacy manager” whatever that means. Her/his letter responded to my criticism of the SABC’s broadcasting of an explicit sexual-education film aimed at children. Usdin’s letter demonstrates yet again the essentially fascist response to criticism that so often is the reflex tactic of self-appointed samaritans. Once these do-gooders have decided what they believe to be mandatory for the improvement of the human race in general, or its societies in particular, God help those who don’t acclaim or at the very least conjoin.
According to Usdin some amorphous faction of “health professionals, parents and educators” have between themselves decided that a long-term strategy of public sex education for young children has become necessary. To do so this clique also decided in advance and entirely of its own brief counsel that all parent-to-child sex information is in urgent need of its intervention. I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that philanthropy is the last resort of people who wish to annoy their fellow beings.
It will be difficult for Dr Usdin and her/his friends at the SABC to accept, but there is a large percentage of parents who would elect to inform their children of sexual matters in their own terms and at ages and times they, the parents, deem appropriate. Or does Dr Usdin believe that individuality in children and the rights of parents are of little consequence and may be trampled over in the general cause?
To assume that all parents are incapable of making their own decisions is arrogant in the extreme. By hijacking domestic prerogatives, Usdin and collaborators fastidiously imitate the fashions of another doctor, one HF Verwoerd. We all remember his opinions of what kind of education was “suitable” for all black people. Usdin’s faction seeks to impose its own notions by exactly the same peremptory methods.