/ 20 July 2001

A theatre of disgust

channel vision

Robert Kirby

Is there any hope for the standards of local television journalism when what is already appalling taste and insensitivity sinks to the level of the sewer? Last week e.tv news kicked off with a story about the savage attacks in a Gauteng men’s hostel with lingering, close-up shots of the bloodstained floor where the murders had taken place. The camera lovingly explored pools of blood, investigated the smears made by the bodies.

These are images to quench the appetites of putrid minds. There can be no excuse for the broadcast of such material. It is an abhorrent celebration of the pornography of violence.

Of this shock material e.tv news has made a speciality. In recent memory we have had film of naked dead bodies being hauled up, pierced by the giant metal hooks of cranes, the gruesome examination of car wreck victims and e.tv’s latest horror, reminiscent of Victorian freak shows, which is to exhibit medical abnormalities of the most distressing kind but now under the justification that in doing so e.tv will be shown to be a “caring” institution.

It is of no use to hope that some correction of the frequently obscene emissions of the e.tv newsroom would come from the directors of the network. Clearly they couldn’t give a damn or else they would long ago have put a stop to the daily exhibitions of gruesome excess.

More’s the pity that elements of the e.tv news team so disgrace their own product. The channel’s news service is the first independent local television news service and is not afraid to tackle political issues the SABC steers well clear of. That e.tv news sullies itself with grotesquerie indicates a patent refusal to believe that the rest of the world does not share its pathological fascination with gore and abnormality. To use Peter Bradshaw’s phrase, it is a theatre of disgust.

In some ways M-Net’s Carte Blanche has become an equivalent of that splendid English consumer journal, Which. Certainly when it comes to warning us about what milk and bottled water brands to avoid certainly not drink the programme is not only informative but continually revealing of the level of corruption in the substrata of South African business.

Not that it’s much of a surprise to find out that second-hand car dealers are a pit of swines they wouldn’t be in that business or nearly as fat as most of them are if they weren’t but it is certainly alarming to see that the professionals who package and bottle our milk are about as gentlemanly and innocent of basic morality as Honest Joe’s Used Cars salesmen.

In many ways even worse than the crooks are the arrays of public officials that Carte Blanche regularly manages to prise out from the bedrock of bureaucracy. These are the sort of public servants whose responsibilities are to make sure that Glorious Dairy Supplies isn’t lacing its milk with hydrogen peroxide in order to mask its exuberant bacterial life, that they aren’t adding water to stretch their profits.

Asked by Carte Blanche why this sort of thing was going on, apparently unnoticed under their noses, the officials all exhibited identical reactions. You couldn’t tell where their deep concern for the public ended and the vindications of their own inefficiency began. When all the bogus diversion was over they played exactly the same trump card: insufficient funds.

In its investigations, what Carte Blanche often interviews are outpost commanders in what might be called a Conspiracy of Clerks, a loose organisation that aims to cripple the world by a process of applied inertia. These are the policemen who won’t investigate visible crime because they haven’t had the right sort of complaint; the cement-brained municipal officials who shuffle papers for a living; the depressive sludge of apathetic grey people who gorge on forms and official stamps; the claims assessors; the health inspectors; the Pick ‘n Pay food manager who, until Carte Blanche came along and told him, somehow hadn’t noticed that his supermarket shelves were loaded with toxic milk.

With equal indifference the Conspiracy of Clerks throttles business and government. Recently in Kenya, Richard Leakey was given the power and then proceeded to fire 80 000 dead-wood civil servants. In that one simple slash-and-burn Kenya’s civil service was turned into a paragon of efficiency and energy.

Every week, with an air of patient desperation, Carte Blanche shows where we should be starting our clean-out.