I’m using this week’s column to scratch at some minor irritations, things that don’t warrant an entire piece.
First of these is something we all experience and this is the extraordinarily long time it takes for most magazines to respond to subscription orders. All my life I’ve been a National Geographic fan; my mother made sure our home had every edition and I’ve never since considered a month complete without this superb magazine gracing my postbox.
Why is it that when you send in a subscription to National Geographic — or to just about any other magazine or periodical — it takes up to three months for your first copy to arrive? Surely all they have to do when they get your subscription order — and bank your money — is to add your name to the subscription list and then send the details down to the dispatch department. Why does this take three months? What bizarre conspiracy of clerks gets in the way?
About the beginning of December last year I ordered a magazine as a Christmas present for a couple of young members of the family. Towards the end of March, the children received three issues in one go. This is standard procedure. No amount of telephone calls to the local offices makes a jot of difference. It’s all bland excuses and the post office’s fault.
With another gift subscription of the same magazine, to my wife’s nephews, the copies were delivered to our address — hardly the post office’s mistake. And they’re all the same.
The prestigious London Review of Books took my money for an annual renewal via a credit card order then blamed its bank for not advising it that the money had arrived. Five months passed between order and arrival of first issue. At least the LRB had the grace to send me the intervening copies.
Try Time or Newsweek and you’ll get exactly the same sloppy
response. It’s all hot sell, but once you order, you end up in a two- to three-month queue. There can’t be any valid excuse. When I lived in Malibu I ordered the Los Angeles Times, by telephone at 6.30 in the evening.
The first copy was on my doorstep at seven the next morning.
Next on my short complaints list is the latest stuff-the-viewer fashion taking hold on local television. This is the on-screen advertising of forthcoming programmes while the previous ones are running. The connoisseur of bogger taste, e.tv, was the first to introduce this intrusion.
During the last quarter hour of each episode of the series Six Feet Under up would come lurid 30-second ‘stripes” across the bottom quarter of the screen — complete with a picture of a leering San Reddy — advising that the news at 10 would be following. What transport viewers were enjoying was ruptured. You expect such crudity from e.tv. One look at its general presentation and you realise e.tv holds the intelligence of its viewers in the deepest contempt.
Duly, M-Net’s Carte Blanche followed suit and that watershed of mediocrity, SABC3, was soon in tow.
Don’t these broadcasters have any consideration for their viewers? They smear their logos on top of everything, they shove up the twice-weekly Lotto results in the middle of films — they have surpassed all reserve.
I’ve kept the lulu for last.
Staying with television and this case the published application form for young people wanting to audition for M-Net’s Idols competition. Various stipulations are included, most of which weigh heavily in M-Net’s favour. Number 4 of the clauses is highly suspicious. It reads: ‘Whether or not you are chosen as a contestant, finalist or the winner, you irrevocably assign all copyright and moral rights conferred by the Copyright Act of 1978, as amended, (the Act) and all the intellectual and/or immaterial property rights and performance rights that vest or may in the future vest in respect of the Contest Related Events and all elements comprising the Programme, to the Producer/the Broadcaster, who accepts such assignments.”
You don’t have to be a legal eagle to hear the alarm bells clanging behind that clause. Imagine some trusting youngster appearing for an M-Net Idols audition with an original song or a completely original interpretation of a standard one. By the very act of applying for the audition his or her intellectual and performance rights are irrevocably assigned to M-Net. And only M-Net will decide what are ‘Contest Related Events” should the applicant go on to future glory.
The clause is a catch-all and offers no ‘out” whatsoever for the applicant. I hope some sharp lawyers look closely at this one. It sucks. Any young innocent signing the audition application is taking one hell of a risk.
And now, despite trout-dissident Dr Jim Cambray, I’m off for a few days of stalking feral, exotic, predatory, foreign, ecodestructive, alien, colonial, eurocentric, elitist, minnow-gobbling Salmo trutta and Oncorhynchus mykiss.
Poor Jim, shame. But then, when you live in academic halls you tend to hear only the echoes of your own quaint notions.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby