When a Special Assignment on the subject of satire was pulled off air by the state broadcaster’s own legal team for the second time it was a déjà vu moment in South African broadcasting history.
The show’s creators cried censorship. The politicians being sent up claimed defamation. Lawyers set their meters ticking. Freedom of speech was flagged down like an ambulance. Celebrated humourists lost it. Political interference in public life was implied. Even the SABC’s announcement about why they had ditched the doctored version of the show at the last minute was so clunky I felt quite faint with nostalgia.
At precisely 8.30pm a news ticker juddered across the screen: “Tonight’s episode of Special Assignment will not be aired owing to the fact that due process with regard to consultation has not been concluded.”
As I scraped my chair closer to the plasma screen I could hear bells ringing: it was like watching TV in the Eighties without the shoulder pads and tear gas.
Admittedly there were one or two other differences. Back then the SABC was the only game in town and it was populated by apartheid’s most trusted white separatists. We all had our own channels, according to our race and language. For example, Afrikaans people seemed predisposed to game shows, while Zulu viewers, judging by the Idols-ancestor programming inflicted on them, appeared partial to music. The news, however, was profanely sacred and came out of the same pipe and got stamped by the same people with the same purpose: to make apartheid work.
TV in the Eighties was crap, which is probably why so many people went to rallies. It might be argued that SABC-TV did almost as much as the ANC to liberate the masses: thanks partly to bad TV, South Africans got out of the house and made the country ungovernable.
Now self-censorship is in the air again over Auckland Park. Only this time muzzled content has somewhere to go — the internet. Thanks to an alleged meeting in a leaky car park with a pixilated source at an unnamed hour, M&GOnline brings you the pre-cut version of the Special Assignment you were prevented from seeing on TV.
Information just wants to be free, tra-la, and humour is ultimately ungovernable.
Still, it is always debatable, as the following excerpt from the original pre-elections version of the show demonstrates. The punch line — in italics — was actually cut by the SABC’s lawyers, apparently for being potentially offensive to gay people. It’s a clip from the sparky puppet spoof Z-News, one of whose creators is Jonathan Shapiro, aka Zapiro the cartoonist at the centre of the current satire blank-out.
The bouffant newscaster — “Hi, my name is Mahendra Ragunath and this is my hair” — interviews [then presidential candidate] Jacob Zuma:
MR: On a personal front, you’ve had more good news?
JZ: Yes, I’m a newly married man.
MR: Yes, not for the first time.
JZ: Yes, for the — [loses count on his fingers]. You sound jealous Mahendra
MR: No, ha ha, not at all.
JZ: Don’t you like women? [Are you gay?]
Is the joke on Jacob Zuma or is it on us? This is no gentle ribbing, but Zuma is not the only, or even the obvious, butt of the jibe. The JZ puppet is taking a poke at those who make assumptions about polygamy, by making a few of his own.
Much has already been made — and is made again in this doccie — of Zapiro’s infamous “Lady Justice” cartoon, showing Justice as a woman about to be raped by Jacob Zuma.
I don’t like it. I can see why it would work on some funny bones in a deliberately “ouch” way. But it’s extremely literal and too studiously daring for my taste.
And no, this doesn’t mean I think such humour ought to be censored, but then neither do I have a have a problem with the idea of a politician suing a cartoonist for his rights.
It’s bad news for TV that this doccie has been banished — and by its own parent. Though put together well enough by director Cobus van Staden it is hardly ground-breaking in style or in substance. It’s competent news magazine material and it ought to have had its 47 minutes then moved swiftly along.
Instead, the report may acquire a samizdat allure that it doesn’t deserve and, to be fair, didn’t ask for. Worse, it tugs us back towards the tedious “for-or-against” polemics of the Eighties.
If shows like Special Assignment are forced underground, can tear gas be far behind? I don’t even want to think about shoulder pads.