I’m using my space this week to get a few whinges off my chest. Some commercial and social sins don’t deserve a full column.
Let’s start with National Geographic. As it has for many, this superb magazine has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Like millions of others, I still faithfully subscribe to it. This is a plea to the business folk who run National Geographic: such a breadth of loyalty deserves something a lot better than we receive from your subscriptions department.
As many will confirm, if you subscribe to National Geographic you have to take what eventually comes. Like waiting up to three months and then getting three copies of the magazine in one postal delivery. I phoned some friends and they confirmed that’s how long it takes National Geographic to start sending out what you’ve paid for. After that the delivery of subsequent issues will be haphazard, sometimes up to a month late. What will arrive with stunning regularity — sometimes before you’ve even received a magazine — will be reminders to renew your subscription. These reminders will continue for a few months after you’ve renewed and paid up.
Another National Geographic speciality comes when you respond to their gift subscriptions. I submitted three for members of my family as Christmas presents. The subscriptions were submitted with payment at the end of November. First copies of the gifts arrived at the end of February — to my address. Once it has got the money National Geographic apparently doesn’t care where or when it sends the magazines.
It’s not only National Geographic. Why does it take so long for magazines to respond to subscriptions? Subscribe to Time or Newsweek and it takes about six weeks before you get a magazine. Surely all they have to do is enter your name and address into a computer, instruct their dispatch departments to add you to the mailing list. Why does this simple process take six weeks? I think they’re too busy handing out your details to junk mailers.
Next whinge. What persuaded the SABC, e.tv and M-Net to indulge in their latest screw-the-viewer device. This is the intrusive trick of flashing up trailers for a following programme while the previous one is still running. There you are, watching the thrilling, funny or heartbreaking last minutes of a drama and suddenly a thick blue stripe slides across the screen saying: Visits to the Other Side with David Conthemall will start at 22:46.
The practice reveals one thing quite clearly: the broadcasters don’t give a tinker’s fart for their customers. Their enjoyment of the programmes is entirely secondary. This is because the broadcasters believe their viewers are all slovenly dickheads who have to be herded into their kennels. The programmes are there principally as carrying agents for the commercials and the hype.
Next, not a whinge but some personal delight in seeing that what I wrote as satirical comment about the excesses of the Mugabe oligarchy has come true. In Not The Mail & Guardian, a parody version of this worthy newspaper, published at the beginning of this year, I wrote about a mythical R34-million luxury wine estate that the South African government was busy acquiring as a suitable retirement home for Mugabe. The send-up was taken seriously by one Jonathan Moyo, gibbering idiot to the Mugabe court. In a furious response published in the Mugabe-loving Chronicle, Moyo slammed the M&G as being “apartheid tainted” and “white-owned”. How dare the paper suggest Mugabe would stoop to such abuse of public funds, that he would ever acquire or build foreign chateaux or mansions.
In last week’s Sunday Times, however, came the revelation that, under fairly transparent financial camouflage, a R30-million mansion is currently under construction at Llandudno, the exclusive beach address in the Western Cape. The said mansion is one of several luxury accommodations intended for the great Bob’s retirement. It’s seldom satire receives such vindication.
Last whinge is directed at those who run the otherwise excellent DStv audio service, DMX. They offer up about 50 different non-stop uninterrupted music channels, ranging from serious to slob-level. Recently they have dropped the category Old Standards and thereby denied us access to the inimitable world of Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, Cole Porter and all the rest of that inspired period of popular songs. These were the lieder of the times, now consigned to the dust heap, replaced by some schlock called Family Favourites, another mutant collection of the dumbed-down.
If you use DMX you now get its newest horror, garish advertisements for itself that you can’t get off your television screen. In the older version of the service you could call up information about what was being played. Otherwise you could leave the screen blank. Now it’s there whether you like it or not. Plus the lurid ads.
In the politest of phrases, this sucks. What DMX is saying is that if the service and the music isn’t pitched at Philistine level, it doesn’t count. Think again DMX. We aren’t all in the gutter.