channel vision
Robert Kirby
I’ve spent a rather pleasant week being escapist, reading stories about a fascinating young fellow called Harry Potter. I don’t know why I’ve waited this long to have a peep at what’s earned JK Rowling such obscene amounts of money, at the same time wondering like every other writer why I’ve never had such a wonderful and essentially innocent idea, one which would award so much pleasure to so many and so much boodle to oneself.
If Rowling’s imagination and inventiveness have no discernible bounds, neither have the interminable television debates and discussions that have attended the aftermath of the recent New York, Washington and Pennsylvania tragedies. Could there ever be so many experts and analysts, so many wise and judicious, so many plainly stupid and exploitative people out there, each ready to give tongue to their theories and explanations?
Prominent among these has been the wealth of freely tendered advice about what form and thrust of retaliatory military action Mr Bush should launch. This has come from every conceivable quarter and the television news stations have lapped it up eagerly. A media event of this magnitude cannot be squandered for want of a few talking heads.
And what talk, too. From the professional moralists who believe that the brutal premeditated murder of thousands of innocent people, the wilful destruction of part of a city by political fanatics, should go unpunished but for some retrained clamour at the United Nations, all the way across to the rednecks who believe that Afghanistan should be nuked as a matter of urgency.
What has been unforgivable is the wholesale exploitation of this tragedy, especially by those who wallow in the dimmer ruts of the media gutter. Locally there was never any doubt which television “service” would first spring into action, display yet again its talent for the charlatan’s grief. It was good old reliable e.tv the penny dreadful of the airwaves.
What did e.tv do? Why, it sent its senior anguish-monger, Debora Patta, all the way to New York so that e.tv’s viewers might be served up with not only her intimate knowledge of the grieving American soul, but her comic-book notions about their most famous city.
“This great city, which, at two in the morning, is at its fun-filled busiest, is now eerily quiet,” intoned Debora. No one seems to have informed her that, but for a tiny minority, most of the people of New York are actually asleep at two in the morning as people usually are in any night-time city. Debora, though, would have it that the real world of New York is one great, big night-long party, just like she’s seen in the bioscope. Shame.
Debbie did New York after a series of straight-to-camera interludes in various airports along the way, in which she described how taxing her pilgrimage was becoming. Particularly charming was the way at London’s Heathrow she bragged about getting seats on one of the few aircraft leaving London for New York, for herself and her crew (to include her personal makeup artist, it is said) and ahead of a queue of desperate Americans. Somehow their needs didn’t override hers.
Once in New York, Debora got around to the serious business of interviewing. Ground Zero became her target and she spent many a touching minute trying to convey the shock and distress of the city in ways that would reach deep into South African hearts. Her research didn’t quite match up to her sentimentality the 107-level World Trade Centre towers were only “70 storeys high” according to Debs but who cares about accuracy at times like these.
Meanwhile e.tv’s distinguished Central Asian authority, Faizel Cook, was over in Islamabad, sloping around the city with his dark glasses glued to the top of his shaven cranium like some sort of plastic antenna, while donating the depth of his perceptions to a clearly fascinated San Reddy. Who wouldn’t be fascinated when one’s reporter looks like an escapee from a George Lucas film set?
It has been all grimly predictable and tasteless in the way that only the coffin flies at e.tv can be grimly predictable and tasteless. But I’ll nonetheless award e.tv news one Slytherins bonus point for last week. They were the only station to spread the exciting news about Mr Thabo Mbeki’s latest Marxist-style sacrifice: his commissioning of a R12-million personal air terminal at Cape Town airport the first of three more in other centres, it is said.
No mixing with hoi polloi for our Thabo. That would be taking democracy to ridiculous lengths.