Over the last six months or so, SABC television’s current affairs programmes have been showing encouraging signs of independent thought. This perception was smashed into dust last Sunday when on SABC2’s Newsmaker programme we had to grit our teeth and put up with 15 minutes of Mr McCaps Motimele, the Unisa senior something-or-other who, according to charges, has been emptying hefty sums of the university’s cash into his own and other pockets. Motimele came across as self-righteous and pompous, the embodiment of every tin-pot bureaucrat suddenly hoisted into a position of power.
All of which guaranteed he got the most comfortable and relaxing ride Vuyo Mbuli could give him. He began by licking diligently at Motimele’s academic background, allowing his guest to wallow lengthily in his inflated opinion of himself and his career. When it came to questioning Motimele about the bizarre goings-on at Unisa, Mbuli let Motimele get away with some outrageous evasions, some truly Orwelllian doublespeak. As to the charges of gross sexual harassment against Motimele — going back all of two years and as yet unresolved — Mbuli let his valued guest flick away the questions as being of no substance and, oh, yes, racist to boot. It was a disgraceful interview and showed a gutless SABC in yet another display of shameless political sycophancy. And where was the great Kader Asmal? Nowhere to be seen. Robert Mugabe would have loved this one.
Next up was Professor Jerry Coovadia, who, despite Mbuli’s sterling efforts at putting across the official line, should be credited with having given the clearest and most unequivocal interview on the subject of the use of the drug nevirapine in helping to inhibit mother-to-baby transmission of HIV. How refreshing to hear someone so articulate, so unshackled in his thinking.
Here was none of the free-range bullshit that is the pathetic currency of the government Department of Health. As Coovadia said, the single dose of nevirapine given to mother and baby is about as toxic as a Panado. Yet South Africa boasts a central government health minister saying that this treatment can’t be safely administered because there might be some effect on the baby 20 years hence.
We all know what happens when the same baby does not get the nevirapine. Freed from the peril of nevirapine’s ”toxic side-effects” the baby is left to die a terrible suffocating death — usually within 18 months. This newspaper has described the African National Congress government policy on the withholding of this particular treatment as being a form of genocide, which is exactly what it is.
For the first time I had a peep at the British series Vice, occasionally being broadcast in the small hours. It’s a curiously intense look into the working of a small group of vice-division detectives in the London Met. Headed by a short, short-tempered detective inspector called Pat Chappell, the series consists of independent episodes that carry longer background plots along with them. The subject in the first episode I saw was the recruitment by a pimp of young girls ”in care”.
The casting in the series is superb, the direction and script economical and refreshingly free of the current vogue among British television directors where ”cleverness” of production supersedes all — and usually gets in the way of the story. For the first time in a long time I was completely engrossed, taken along with the fury of Chappell’s emotions, enraged by the complacency of his senior officers. It is so rewarding to enjoy a script that awards three dimensions to its villains, not the plastic stereotypes of United States cop shows. The pimp, as hateful as he was, preying on 15-year-olds, had a history and a human side.
First-rate entertainment with one depressing blip. Towards the end of the first story a very troubled young man tries to hang himself. He is rescued, brought down just in time and a man holds his near-lifeless body. In panic he cries out, ”For God’s sake call an ambulance.”
The word ”God” had been censored by M-Net. Can you believe it? Someone on the M-Net staff, on instructions from on high, sits patiently hour after hour, day after day, week after week, listening to soundtracks and carefully excising what the lofty Christian guarantors of the M-Net board deem to be blasphemies too terrible to be heard. One wonders how God has survived all these millennia without the piety of the M-Net board to help him along. There can be as many ”motherfuckers” and ”shits” and ”suck my dicks” as can be crammed in, but let one solitary ”God” slip past and we sink to perdition. What hypocrites.
It really is high time that MultiChoice/DStv kicked their final presentation into some sort of order. Their annoying little signal blackouts are back again and going strong — and I’ve got my new smart card — and what is becoming more and more difficult to accept are the varying sound levels in the bouquet. Surely MultiChoice can sort this out, get them all more or less the same. BBC World sound is invariably at a far lower level than the other news channels. You never know what to expect on others. Sometimes they blare at you, sometimes they’re almost inaudible.
Another case of you pays your money and you takes your Multichoice.
The Mail&Guardian, December 11, 2001