Last weekend I flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town on South African Airways, and I can recommend the experience to anyone. If you are a lobotomised deaf-blind dwarf with a stapled stomach, it is a marvellous way to spend two hours.
It has become passé to complain about airlines and their tenuous grasp of anatomical realities, but somewhere over Kimberley I began to fantasise about kicking an SAA executive in the shin until he cried. Of course I’d have to wait until the feeling returned to my legs and the spasm in my spine subsided, but then he’d catch hell.
But the tightly rationed oxygen in the cabin kept me drowsy, and as my maybe-chicken-maybe-donkey sandwich digested its plastic wrapper, I let my eyes wander to the screens that dangled overhead, digital teats for the rapidly regressing mind.
In-flight entertainment varies around the world. Fly El-Al and you can pass the time counting the number of rivets on the Israeli F-16 cruising on your wingtip. China Air passengers are handed hefty high-resolution cameras just before low passes over Alaska.
‘On your left you will see Disneyland. Pay no attention to the large radar dish and scurrying troops, they are part of the ‘Round-Eye Western Devil Seeks Global Domination’ display. Please hand your film to the Comrade Stewardess as you leave the aircraft.”
And SAA has practical jokers. But not highbrow fare like Leon Schuster putting shoe-polish on his face and hitting Jimmy Abbot with a snoek, either. I’m talking about French-Canadians, that sad tribe addicted to garlic and ennui, marooned in an arctic wasteland populated with mosquitoes and mimes, making television that is as funny as bandage seepage.
A man in a gorilla suit jumps out of a shrub. His victim flares a nostril and walks on. Out he jumps again. A man steps politely aside to give him space. Out he jumps again. A Belgian tourist takes a picture of him. He rushes the Belgian. The Belgian steps politely aside to give him space.
At last, when all of Quebec has promenaded gloomily past the shrub, airing their poodles and soufflés, fresh japes are aired: a gendarme picking his nose, a baguette that farts, immediate unconditional surrender to Germany, and so on.
Finally the last skirt fell off the last mademoiselle, the last Renault reversed over the last mechanic’s hand, and I could return to my book, the biography of Ali Bacher, helpfully titled Ali in case the huge mug-shot of the good doctor on the cover hadn’t quite rung a bell. Now to find my place — ah, page 1 397, in which Ali brushes his teeth and decides to go with the white shirt rather than the blue one.
A child, apparently raised in a cave by iguanas, began throwing peanuts at the couple behind him. His legal guardian (‘mother” implies active parenting) was entranced by her copy of heat and too busy moving her lips to restrain her spawn. The person in front of me inhaled and through no fault of his own sank his seatback into my kneecaps. There was the sound of grinding cartilage, punctuated by the regular plopping of peanuts on foreheads.
The screens had descended again and were showing Sights and Sounds of Cape Town: some malnourished geese on a concrete overpass, a van at a red traffic light, dust blowing across shacks, a rotting goal on a weed-infested soccer field.
And that was when it all came together, like a celestial thunderclap, like a mime falling down a lift shaft for the benefit of a hidden camera. Rotten soccer! Ali! Kneecaps! Iguanas! French-Canadians! Geese! It was a plan; Bacheresque in its simplicity and cunning. And with a single masterstroke it will guarantee Bafana Bafana victory in every World Cup match they play in 2010.
I know what you’re thinking, but it would take far too long to beat the Brazilians unconscious with a copy of Ali. Likewise it is very difficult to arrange for teams to be reversed over by a man in a gorilla suit driving a Renault. No, the plan demands that we welcome the world. Let them come, the Brazilians and the French and the English. Let them come with their big names and their big feet and their long legs.
But let them come on SAA, Economy Class, and then let the games begin.