Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
In advance of another season of the rather pitiful Mr Bean, SABC3 last week ran a “special”, which was more a documentary on Rowan Atkinson than anything else. As a promo for Bean the exercise was oddly counterproductive in that, by offering a retrospective of Atkinson’s remarkable comic abilities, it left you wondering what on Earth made him decide to do the Bean thing. It has been an enormous success so clearly there’s nothing amiss with Atkinson’s business instincts, but the consequence is that he is now forever stuck with Bean. More’s the pity because to see snatches of his multiple roles of the past, that indefinable quality of both visual and spoken comedy Atkinson had, is to despair.
It’s hard to accept that someone of Atkinson’s obvious intelligence and style really believes the justification he offered for his plunge into moronic buffoonery. If he had said that he wanted to appeal to children it would have been more defensible than his claiming as it has become fashionable for all the dumbing-downers that he wanted to make his work more “accessible”, another term for simple-minded.
Although hardly an apt comparison, so-called “accessibility” was the driving idiocy behind the translation and paraphrasing of the Bible into modern idiom the revised standard version and many others. The alibis were similar. We are only trying to “reach” the people, said the clerical marketers, something in their opinions the King James version has failed to do all these centuries. It is depressing what sins may be justified by that argument: the themes of Mozart set to electronic supermarket beats … you can go on for hours on that subject.
Bean is not funny and eventually even good taste comes into it. The programme gave us a fine example, in a scene from the Mr Bean film in which the leering hero takes a sick bag from a young boy on an airliner, not knowing it has just been used. Thinking he will amuse the boy, Bean inflates the paper bag and then pops it over the head of a sleeping passenger, covering him in vomit.
Presumably this was chosen as being representative of Rowan Atkinson at the apogee of his comic art. Interviewed, his collaborators went on to describe him as “one of the single greatest comic geniuses of the 20th century” sleep on, Charlie Chaplin, he’ll never match you however desperately he tries to copy. If the vomit sketch is supposed to vindicate “accessibility”, I think I’ll try to remember the Rowan Atkinson of Not the Nine O’Clock News, the almost immortal school roll-call sketch, or of dozens of other examples of memorable comic invention. Mr Bean is a load of trash.
What is it that promotes SABC3’s ongoing fascination with prostitution? They’ve just finished running a whole series on the subject; over the last couple of years there has been a rash of almost identical programmes. Last Sunday up came one more in the form of Sex, Cents and Religion, an hour of tickle-the-dominee material designed to scrub the fun out of yet another Sunday evening on South African television.
The central thesis of this programme was that a new urban religion has evolved. Dubbed “consumerism” this is one in which shopping malls have replaced cathedrals as places of worship. The new priests are economists and the new evangelists are advertisers. The iconography of this new religion is assiduously raunchy in nature, to be found in the multiple display of sexually enticing imagery: naughty magazines through strip clubs to porno shops and, of course, hovering hookers.
An assemblage of typically stodgy commentators was roped in to endorse all this deep thinking while, to give relief, a couple of erotic dancers writhed on the floor. Frequent archaeological references were included with Stonehenge elected as the characteristic symbol of the Stone Age and as a probable venue for druidic gang bangs.
It has become a clich to hear prostitutes or their support groupies explain that hooking is some sort of social service. Poor Jill Sloan of Sweat is a case in point. Mind you, if you are going to carry both Sodom and Gomorrah on your shoulders you deserve to look careworn.
None of the above comment is intended to suggest that by its infatuation with prostitution the SABC is, in effect, itself becoming a brothel. It will require quite a few more years of steady moral improvement before the corporation can aspire to such a charmed prerogative.