An ”egregious carpetbagger” is a sobriquet coined by Ken Owen, former editor of the Sunday Times, which he applied with some enthusiasm to Ronald Suresh Roberts, former authorised biographer of Nadine Gordimer. I hope Owen will forgive my borrowing his words to describe the BBC World’s television interviewer, Tim Sebastian, for if ever there was a carpetbagger it is he.
Sebastian was in Johannesburg recently, conducting a series of interviews as part of yet another BBC World ”Focus on Africa” season. Carried out regularly by the BBC, these ”focus” exercises are earnest and well-meaning to a degree that renders them ominous. Their function is cathartic: they are less informative television programmes than they are release valves for the discharge of what is still a ruthless missionary zeal in the British national pschye.
You can hear the BBC World directors’ worried squeal. ”The savages out in Africa are getting restless again. They need some more tenderising. Let’s slap together some programmes to show them, not only how deep is our concern for them, but at the same time give them a few refresher lessons on how to think and behave in ways acceptable to us, their benefactors. They’re natives, you know, so keep things two-dimensional, easy to shake a finger at and as slimily patronising as possible. Make sure that banal little moral umpire, Tim Sebastian, is on the team. That’s why we’ve got those grand words scrawled into the granite pediments of Bush House: Nations Shall Speak PC Unto Nations.”
Sebastian is the main interviewer of the BBC World programme, Hardtalk. That he regards his work, and hence himself, as mandatory constituents of international discourse, was obvious in the interview he gave to 702. Sebastian has no illusions about his being something of far more sterling account than just another superficial TV host. With little verbal nods of modesty, he forced himself to admit how relevant and important his work had become, how Hardtalk had grown in global significance under his influence. This is called being a victim of your own myth.
Last week BBC World broadcast the results of Sebastian’s latest foray. It would be prudent of the BBC to consider not broadcasting Sebastian’s interviews to the places where he travelled to do them as this tends to reveal how shallow is his research, how blurred his comprehension. In this case, any South African more than vaguely aware of national matters political or historical, was able to recognise a cheap and nasty methodology in action. When all the hype and snarling is removed, when all the deep-digging and fearless questions have been asked, HardTalk under Sebastian is revealed for what it really is: the tabloid going as substance.
Sebastian’s interview with Helen Suzman was at first simply annoying. As it proceeded, it gained a sort of farce-like quality as Sebastian battled to find ways to denigrate and belittle what Suzman had done in her years of opposition to the National Party joyride. According to Sebastian, all Suzman achieved was to be a sort plaything to the überboere, a token. ”Surely they only allowed you to be in Parliament so as to give the impression of democracy to the outside world,” sneered Sebastian. ”Wasn’t that your actual role? A part of the system?”
To which analysis we might wonder why so innocuous and supportive a role by Suzman would have prompted a remark by a justice minister of the time, BJ Vorster. ”Don’t talk to me about Helen Suzman. Hitler would have known exactly what to with that Jewess bitch,” Vorster said to one of his golfing mates.
Suzman needs no knights riding to her rescue. She dismissed Sebastian with her usual vigour and style. The result was that Sebastian came out of the interview looking like a thug. True to type he retreated into personal attack. In an interview a few years ago Sebastian was being calmly demolished by surgeon Chris Barnard. On that occasion he chose to escape by introducing the subject of the suicide of Barnard’s son. So grotesque an intrusion into a private grief had no place in the colloquy. On 702 Sebastian bragged about how he had reduced Barnard to tears.
In another of the interviews it was as rare a pleasure to watch Tony Leon literally wipe the floor with Sebastian who was reduced to his lager-lout interviewer crudity, interrupting, shouting down any argument that wasn’t going the way he wanted it to go.
What is most sickening about Sebastian is the way he crawls, like some obscene cockroach, over the political afflictions, the human tragedies of others. As he questions his subjects he secretes a glistening trail of shocked decency, so as to make sure everyone knows he’s a dependable goody-two-shoes. He speaks of the ”appalling human tragedy of apartheid”, the ”outrageous history of white avarice” and all the rest of it. Yet he finds no error in interviewing, as he did last time he was here, a subhuman monster such as Craig Williamson, to give voice to one of apartheid’s foulest products.
Oh well, tabloid is tabloid and grimy sensationalism is its main ingredient. Tim Sebastian is good solid grist to the News of the BBC World.