channel vision
Robert Kirby
Speaking on last Sunday’s Carte Blanche, visiting BBC interviewer Tim Sebastian recalled a comment once made to him by Northern Ireland mandarin Gerry Adams. “How long have you been in Northern Ireland?” asked Adams, after being interviewed by Sebastian. “Since this morning,” said Sebastian. “It shows,” said Adams.
Last week’s series of Hardtalk interviews the so-called South Africa Week gave more or less the same impression. With all the careful research done by his support team, Sebastian never got much beyond the superficial in his questionings, choosing rather to play a rather hackneyed role: the typically querulous and outraged English commentator on South African affairs that used to be so popular and profitable during the apartheid years. This approach smacks of an unwillingness by the British to resist their ingrained colonialist impulses. They are forever yielding to the need to “go out there and tell those native chappies where they’re going wrong”.
Sebastian’s opening interview, with President Thabo Mbeki, set this tone, one to which he grimly stuck mainly because in his Hardtalk daily interviews now amounting to more than 1000 he has demonstrated no other method or style. Except on the occasions when he lapses into smarmy sentimentality, Sebastian operates in a state of barely controlled pique. The bombastic headmaster, always desperate to catch someone out. When he feels he’s getting close to a scoring point his voice rises to an indignant treble, he starts to interrupt more than he usually does and, as the frenzy overwhelms him, he starts wagging his head, spitting out questions with little indignant twirls on the end of them.
For all Sebastian’s posturings, all the Mbeki interview yielded was a musty recycling of the same old questions we’ve been hearing for years. Especially on the matter of HIV/Aids, the vaunted Sebastian technique evinced only yet another bleary tour around the president’s anally retentive opinions on the relationship between “syndromes” and “viruses” and all the other circumlocutory bollocks no one takes much notice of any more.
Admittedly Sebastian plays to a wider audience than South Africa’s. But it’s all been said before and better. On the subject of the Zimbabwean debacle he did get Mbeki to admit that he’d failed in his policy of quiet diplomacy as if everyone wasn’t already aware of that. What he didn’t manage to do was to get Mbeki even to hint at what he intends to do about Loony Bob apart from publicly fondling him and going on those fun-filled motorcades with him. All we got were some eloquent shrugs.
When it came to Cyril Ramaphosa I must admit to feeling sorry for Sebastian. Getting anything out of Sir Wiseman Rampo was like trying to interview the owner of a castle dressed in full-length armour, hiding behind a dropped portcullis, a raised drawbridge, a 6m iron-clad gate and a curtain of boiling oil. Cyril was having nothing of the Sebastian petards. They bounced off his defences as he waffled on about this and that and denied any substance to Shades Tshwete’s entertaining plot theories.
Patricia de Lille got her bash on the Thursday and turned out to be the vacant windbag she too often is. On the subject of the recent exploitative Pan-Africanist Congress-led land invasions, Sebastian could have roasted her alive. Nary much sign of that in Tim’s kitchen.
But what in God’s name persuaded the producers of Hardtalk to give air time to the human obscenity, Craig Williamson? What possible service to truth or information is accomplished by hearing the squalid justifications of so verminous a denizen of past security-police sewers? The answer is obvious. Mr Sebastian and his producers have their own role to play, which, as its core inspiration, has the presentation of themselves as righteous, morally pre-eminent, committed evaluators of the social and political disgraces of others. It is a stance that reeks of marketable piety, in this case a craving to be seen as fellow counterhands in the apartheid sub-department of what has now become the international racism industry Pityana Enterprises Unlimited.
When your need to be seen as morally punctilious is as sore as Hardtalk’s, you think nothing of shovelling in scum like Williamson. It makes you look good, facing up to the monsters everyone else is trying to forget. Trouble is, the screen looks so grimy afterwards.
“But then I never shake the hands of the killers I interview,” said Sebastian. Good for you, Tim, old boy. We knew your moral infallibility would eventually filter through.