What lasts just 30 minutes yet feels interminable, features ghastly acting and worse enunciation, and is all but irrelevant to daily life? Apart from a Noam Chomsky lecture.
The answer you’ll most often get is inexplicable: soap operas. Somehow the noble institution of the daytime drama has been flung into the ghetto of self-condemnation that now seems to mark every intellectual exercise the Western liberal indulges in.
This creature — the froth on the lukewarm cappuccino of multiculturalism — has decreed his culture to be an abomination and lies awake at night, swatting mosquitoes with a rolled-up copy of The Guardian, wishing that his forebears had invented ubuntu and ancestor-worship rather than the Enlightenment.
Oh, to live in a society where passion and emotion hold sway rather than cold reason, somewhere exotic like Afghanistan or the West Bank. How lovely that would be, he dreams, measuring his pigeon chest and wondering how many sticks of dynamite he could strap around it.
In this climate of frantic cultural euthanasia soaps don’t stand a chance. But to quote the rugged and altruistic star of the longest-running soap in history, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
There is a tranquility in soap opera that brings transcendence to its disciples: what does one care of globalisation when little Isaac Carver, stolen from his murdered alcoholic birth-mother and switched with the infant of the upstanding Bradys as part of Stefano de Mera’s ongoing yet still obscure plan for their downfall, has been claimed by his biological father, a beefy guy from Utah married to a fishwife called Barb?
Which is why I was inconsolable this week when I tuned in to contemplate my Midwestern nirvana and found instead something called the Africa Cup of Nations. Lotus blossoms and incense flew across the room as sage-rage took hold.
It’s not a lot to ask. An hour of Days of Our Lives, the REM-sleep of soap-time, its cardboard sets and Puritan morality deeply rejuvenating; then 24 minutes of The Bold and the Beautiful, a dreamy interlude with half an eye on the unlikely sexual dalliances of Brooke Forrester, once an emerald-eyed temptress but now craggy and saggy enough to be mistaken either for Clint Eastwood or a horse, or both. And finally Isidingo, its wooden dialogue a gentle reminder of the realities of inarticulate South Africa, a slow return to wakefulness.
But Ya Mampela SABC1 was intent on keeping it real, and so the pasteboard-and-spit homesteads of Salem and the Ellerines catalogue mansions of LA were gone. Helpless, enraged, confused, I watched. But as Burkina Faso swung its footballing handbag at Mali, a familiar euphoria began to flood through me. And slowly it dawned: I would get my soap opera fix after all.
The set was unmistakably nasty, the kind of concrete stadium favoured by developing countries, ideal for football in the morning and mass-reprisals in the afternoon. The extras were vintage soap. Just plentiful enough to suggest a crowd, they responded with uniform zeal to every twist of the game: a saved goal, a late tackle, a tumbleweed slowly rolling across the middle of the pitch.
But it was the plot that sold me. Nothing happened. Nothing happened for an hour. The next day nothing happened either. Somehow, without a single drama lesson, African soccer had perfected what took the United States 40 years.
They had mastered an entertainment in which people with ridiculous names scurried about, laughed, cried, clutched their shins, hugged and kissed (but indulged in no sex other than heavy petting, and only then while fully dressed), without once creating anything resembling a sense of direction or intention. It was heavenly.
Naturally there were sporadic bursts of action, but true to form they were ludicrous, wildly exaggerated and deeply satisfying. Take for example the episode this week in which ‘Boy” Bafana, the fast-talking city slicker with delusions of grandeur, ran into the shady Nige Eria, the Stefano de Mera of African soccer: 4-0 to the layman, to the soap aficionado it was no less than a full abduction, followed by brain-washing, microchip implantation, and zombie-like seduction of someone else’s wife.
In next week’s episode ‘Boy” will stumble back home to his Jozi penthouse with a vague sense of unease as he picks at the enormous scab on his head that has a little aerial poking out of it. Reviewing his performance in Tunisia, experts suspect that he has been lobotomised, again.
Either that or he’s been watching Backstage.