channel vision Robert Kirby
This is the last column of the year and, as is the habit of columnists, I take a fearful look across the year behind us to see what really stood out in television. No prizes for guessing that the coverage of the World Trade Center attacks was the winner in a race no one wanted to run. Daily the excesses of a world that seems to have gone mad, crowded our screens. In one day last week we had the Indian parliamentary incursions, new West Bank bombings, the vision of the monster, Osama bin Laden, smugly accepting compliments for his mass murderings, the reporting of yet more rapes of children, and the rest of the daily horror stories. I suppose the worst of all”amusement” came in the form of South Africa’s first taste of”reality” television. Big Brother’s success was a small masterpiece of marketing and about as entertaining as watching a pile of domestic garbage decay. What it said about the level of South African taste is better not to imagine. As far as political television went, what stood out more than anything else was another 12 month-long display of a slavish SABC news department wielding its many tongues. In one Sunday evening broadcast the reliably dubious Mr Tony Yengeni was holding forth on how pristine the ANC’s motives in the current arms deal were. Butter wouldn’t have melted. A few weeks later we had to watch Frene Ginwala declaiming on in her usual pompous tones about the traditions and ethics of the democratic institution of Parliament. Butter would actually have grown harder in the iciness of her disdain for criticism. If you wait for it there is some justice. One of the most pleasurable moments of the entire year was watching Mr Y under arrest for fraud and not a sign of the supercilious sneer to be seen never mind a token of humility from the Sari With The Whinge On Top. For political interviews, first, second and third prize for 2001 go to Debora Patta for her resounding lashing on e-tv’s 3rd Degree of Lieutenant General Andrew Masondo. Patta was asking Masondo about the mysterious disappearance of about R300-million, funding from the Department of Defence for the Service Corps, of which he is the chief. It was an interview that deserves some sort of prize. It should go down both as a classicand a benchmark.
For pure greasy toadiness in political reporting, Mr Thabo Mbeki’s devoted SABC television press corps sycophant, Miranda Strydom, takes the prize: a bright orange industrial strength suction pump (flatteries not included) and which should help her slither even further into the warm grottoes of favour. The BBC’s roving moralist, Lord Tim Sebastian of Hardtalk, visited South Africa this year, emitting his two-dimensional verities in all directions. It must be wonderful to know so much about everybody else’s mistakes and misinterpretations as Tim Sebastian does a truly god-like charity. Why he chose to give time to the slimiest of apartheid’s white police trash, Craig Williamson, is hard to understand. Tim, of course, had an ethical defence ready almost as credible as Williamson’s was for posting bombs to kill children. Tim told Carte Blanche that at the end of the interview he didn’t shake Craig’s hand as he never shakes the hands of killers. What terrible punishment was this. For much of the year Special Assignment seemed loath to abandon its obsession with prostitution, even dragging in street children, filming innocent visitors to night clubs and then editing them into other footage so that they looked like denizens of a drug den. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa scolded them. The highlight of Special Assignment’s year was their ludicrous”investigation” of the deaths of some sea birds that had been imprisoned in dingy concrete pens at an East London aquarium more a release for the poor creatures than anything else. For me, two small untrumpeted programmes, transmitted late one Sunday afternoon on SABC 3, were of the year’s most telling television. One told of the sudden and unexpected devastation visited upon deep forest dwellers in Cameroon. In this case it was not political extremism that brought panic and chaos to this small community, rather a bitter and focused terrorism of a different sort: the arrival in their edenic lives of monstrous machines, the cable and fire, the mechanical brutality of French loggers. The other was the BBC examination of the slave children of West Africa: the revelation that there is currently an inhuman trade in which 200 000 children are bartered into slave labour every year. The SABC, or course, didn’t touch this one.