One thing you have to say for Darrel Bristow-Bovey, he goes out with all his guns sputtering. Last Sunday SAfm listeners heard the embattled columnist advance the rather novel defence that he hadn’t actually plagiarised anything because it’s impossible to plagiarise material that has already been plagiarised. What he lifted from Bill Bryson had already been in the public domain when Bryson first lifted it.
A novel defence indeed, but one which didn’t inhibit the SABC’s famous talking corpse, Jeremy Maggs, from a display of gut-wrenching magnanimity. “We’ll miss you and we all hope you’ll be back, Darrel,” oozed Jeremy. “If you ever want to put your side of the story, please just get in touch.” Jeremy is very generous with the embalming fluid.
It seems that all the spite and vitriol of Bristow-Bovey’s envious fellow male columnists has at last paid off. As he added, the closing down of his columns had nothing to do with plagiarism, but was really because the fountain of pure malice from the said fellow male columnists made it impossible for the newspapers to continue publishing what at least two of their editors declared has been his near-genius level writing.
As a battered South African print media struggles to right itself after the decline and fall of its gifted young bard, we are left to marvel at adjacent behaviour of those who have stood so valiantly in support of Bristow-Bovey. Among these has been Steve Connolly, the MD of Struik Publishers, a subsidiary imprint of which group published Bristow-Bovey’s first book — or was it a compendium?
Connolly was on the same Maggs radio show the Sunday before, fervently singing the praises of Bristow-Bovey and assuring everyone that all Bristow-Bovey did was “paraphrase” a joke or two from Bryson and then wondering why everyone was getting so upset about such an insignificant peccadillo. Exactly like Darrel, himself, did in his last-minute “apology” in Business Day, Connolly used the occasion to punt a forth- coming book by his cruelly maligned author.
This new publication is a collection of Bristow-Bovey’s columns. The collection is already on bookshop shelves, it is not yet known whether it includes the now infamous column for which material was lifted from the English television personality, Jeremy Paxman’s book — which mistakenly led to DB-B’s columns being dropped by three newspapers. (The offending column, published in the Cape Times on May 15, has been removed from the Independent Newspapers website archive. The columns before and after remain. Is this Independent News- papers’s admission of guilt?)
It is also obvious how the term “paraphrase” has been exploited by the apologists. The dictionary definition of the word is: “the expression of the same thing in other words”. This is certainly not the case with the material lifted from Bryson. Here, the material was copied word for word, with a few changes here and there in what, it can be argued, was deliberate verbal camouflage. Here’s just one example:
Bryson: Consider this intriguing fact: almost 50 000 Americans are injured each year by pencils, pens and other desk accessories. How do they do it? I have spent many long hours at desks when I would have greeted almost any kind of injury as a welcome diversion, but never once have I come close to achieving actual bodily harm.
Bristow-Bovey: Consider: every year more than 50 000 Americans are injured at home by pens, pencils and other desk accessories. How does this happen? I have myself spent many long hours at desks when I would have been grateful for almost any injury as a welcome diversion, but I have never managed to achieve actual bodily harm.
Anyone who calls the above a “paraphrase” is either deeply stupid or willfully misleading. Both Bristow-Bovey and his publisher deny he ever sat and copied Bryson’s work. The amazing similarity in lines of text is loftily attributed to Bristow-Bovey’s fantastic photographic memory. I hereby challenge him to prove he has such as phenomenal gift in an independent (and I don’t mean Independent Newspapers) public test of this memory.
Last week I e-mailed Connolly asking whether, as publisher, Struik could guarantee that the new book does not contain any “additives” — to use David Bullard’s amiable term. I received a reply that deserves a longer response than I have space for here. I’ll postpone that delight until next Friday.
The question also arises of SABC bias in this matter. Why did Maggs and his producers see fit to afford two interviews to the “Save Bristow-Bovey” camp and not even one to anyone who differed? On the 14th of this month Maggs assured his listeners that the following Sunday Bullard of the Sunday Times would be invited to answer criticism of his views on the matter. After all, Bullard was mentioned several times in the programme as being Bristow-Bovey’s chief detractor. Maggs’s public undertaking was not honoured. Why?
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!” — Walter Scott