But I Digress ... Read online

  But cooking, no. Brinjals and measuring jugs and sliced fingertips are not fit companions, even for a sensitive man of the nineties. Besides which, there is always someone at the dinner table who says: “Oh, it’s so nice to eat some plain cooking for a change.”

  So much worse are cooking programmes on television – they’re ordinarily all bright lighting and phoney sets and fussy little kitchen nerds like Graham Kerr with their smug tips about how to keep your mushrooms fresh. Which is why Keith Floyd is so surprisingly welcome a visitor in the Hot Medium household. Few are the middle-aged men who can beetle on to my screen and say, “Hello, we are making the most amazing fish soup,” and expect to be around long enough to enjoy a pre-dinner cocktail.

  Floyd’s Fjord Fiesta (M-Net, Fridays, 7pm) – try saying that with a mouthful of martini olives – is Keith’s culinary voyage through the frozen waters and endless afternoons of a Scandinavian summer. He was there to “interpret local cuisine”, but judging by the volume of wine and aquavit he siphoned down, the chief attraction for Keith was that sundowners last all day and all night.

  He was having a hard time impressing the locals. We joined him as he lovingly prepared a meal for the officers of his cruise ship, including a special beetroot cream he had invented for the occasion. The first mate scowled at her plate. “This is not in the Norwegian way of preparing beetroot,” she intoned accusingly. The captain just frowned and scraped his teeth with his fork.

  Small wonder Keith kept reaching for the brown paper bag, muttering, “It’s time for my mid-morning slurp.” His next stop was an outdoor cooking session at the site of the 1st International Herring Festival. Sadly for the organisers of the fest, it was deserted, save for the intrepid Keith and his assistants (whom, to his credit, he never once called his herring aids).

  Spurning the regional delicacy of fermented herring – a dish available from local restaurants only as takeaways – Keith whipped up a kind of finsand-all stir-fry, using whole, gutted herrings. I wish he hadn’t. It was a cruel picture – their horrible wide eyes staring up helplessly from the pan as Keith prodded at them like some infernal Marquis de Sardine.

  But enough of the frying puns. Keith was getting desperate. His next cooking location was down the pit in what he gamely admired as “the world’s biggest iron-ore mine”. If the scenery was about as gripping as an Ingmar Bergman movie, Keith himself rose to new heights of alcoholic entertainment. Oh happy moment of television magic when he accidentally reached for a beaker of neat brandy instead of his usual crisp chardonnay.

  “Oh my god,” he spluttered, “have you ever done that? Picked up a stranger’s drink and nearly thrown up over the bar?” Worse things will happen if you pick up a stranger’s drink down at the Chalk ’n Cue, Keith.

  You can’t help liking Keith Floyd, prickly old cuss though he may be. He marches across the screen extracting such generous yet unabashedly selfish pleasure from the simple indulgences of life that I’m almost tempted to try one of his recipes. Any man who can stand in the midst of the world’s most dour and fleece-lined beach party, surrounded by po-faced herring enthusiasts, sample a raw sea-urchin and say, “Mmmm, good for the sex life” … well, I’ll wash the dishes for him any time.

  I wouldn’t even open a packet of paper plates for the makers of The Avenues (SABC3, Mondays, 9pm). A new local drama series, it’s not so much an avenue as a suburban cul-de-sac, littered with bad ideas and crumpled scraps of dialogue that were rejected by SABC1 continuity announcers for being too facile.

  The only reasonable explanation for the unutterable direness of the writing is that it is scripted and directed by someone born entirely without ears. No one who has ever heard people speak could possibly force an actor to say those lines. It would be too wantonly cruel. A man scolds his children in an annoyed tone of voice – is this enough to let us know that they have annoyed him? Oh no. We have to hear the echoing voice-over. “These children will drive me to distraction.”

  The man and his wife are arguing at breakfast. He criticises her family. “My family are good, solid people,” she replies, with all the verve and authenticity of a papier-mâché grapefruit, “and good, solid people are what you need for a dynamic society.”

  A good, solid colonic irrigation is what you need after digesting this script. Mind you, the direction did provide one viewing highlight. Whenever two people are talking, the camera swings laboriously from one to the other and back again, as though the filmmaker were a handicam-toting Japanese tourist taking in the sights at Sun City. On one occasion – ever to be treasured – the camera swung from man to woman and back again, but found only a blank expanse of wallpaper where the man had been. The actor, caught up in the drama of the moment, had taken an unscripted step backwards.

  Why are local English productions so accursedly poor? They descend on us like one of the plagues of Moses, like the sufferings visited upon Job, like the wrath of Olympian gods for the hubris of the early Greeks. What have we done to deserve such stern treatment? It makes me long for a Nordic beach party and a glass of chilled aquavit with a frozen herring for a swizzle stick.

  The humiliations of charity

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 20 DECEMBER 1998

  TO THE LEFT, bounce, jiggle … to the right, lunge, wheeze … ooh, you’ll have to excuse me if the column is a little breathless this week. It’s hard to type while bouncing and jiggling, and when you throw lunging and wheezing into the equation, well, I just hope I don’t come out sounding like Barry Ronge, that’s all.

  I am trying to get in shape, you see, to avoid a repetition of the kind of humiliation that was my lot earlier this week. While others were putting their Day of Reconciliation to its more traditional use – road accidents and public drunkenness – I was sacrificing my hamstrings and dignity in the name of charity.

  “It’s an aerobics workout for the benefit of children with multiple sclerosis,” the organiser had lilted cheerily. I couldn’t think of anything that children with multiple sclerosis had done for me lately, but I didn’t want to appear petty.

  Pettiness would have been the sensible option. I am not, it is safe to say, inclined to athleticism. There are whelks and barnacles clinging to rocks in the Western Cape with more get-up-and-go. There are oysters being served on a bed of ice with Tabasco and lemon juice with a healthier cardiovascular system. The last time I broke a sweat – besides the occasion when I accidentally tuned in to Michelle Garforth’s travel show without wearing my hessian hood and beeswax earplugs – was Black Thursday 1993, when I misplaced my TV remote control and had to change channels manually until Mr Delivery arrived.

  In preparation for the workout, I settled down to watch a morning of fitness-product infomercials, but soon I had to stop, owing to a low tolerance for the word “buns”. A blonde was wearing a leotard so tight I wasn’t sure which part of her body she was waggling at the camera. “Do you dream of firm, tight buns?” she purred. “Try the Bunblaster.” The hell I will.

  So it was unfirm of thigh and with buns unblasted that I took to the aerobics floor with the few other media types who hadn’t fled to Cape Town to escape all the jouncing and biggling. For decorum’s sake, I shall draw a veil over the proceedings. Suffice to say that you haven’t tasted shame until you’ve been publicly caught cheating at a charity event in benefit of the handicapped. “That man with the red face isn’t sitting all the way up in his sit-ups!” I heard the piping voice of a small child. The crowd hissed its agreement. Someone threw a paper cup at me in disgust.

  After that I tried my best, but in the field of physical activity my best isn’t significantly different from my worst. One of the organisers circulated through the crowd, pointing at my star-jumps and murmuring, “That’s what you look like when you have multiple sclerosis.”

  “Shame!” gasped the crowd, emptying their pockets into the collection box.

  It is, of course, an untrue accusation. I am insufficiently co-ordinated to have multiple sclerosis – one sclerosis at a ti
me is about all I could handle without dropping something.

  Even worse, as I lay gasping for air like a coelacanth on a Madagascan beach choking on a carelessly discarded leg-warmer, was seeing the ageless Gordon Mulholland dashing through his routine like a young gazelle.

  “Bunblaster?” I gasped from the floor.

  He smirked mysteriously. “So they call me,” he rumbled.

  Packed in ice and taking intravenous doses of Deep Heat, I was fundamentally out of sympathy with the idea of charitable causes by the time I watched Christopher Reeve – A Celebration of Hope (M-Net, Sunday, 7pm), a fundraiser for a foundation that Reeve established to find a cure for spinal injuries. It confirmed my suspicion that selfishness and apathy, while socially unproductive, are far more aesthetically pleasing human traits than public displays of compassion and empathy.

  Reeve himself, strapped in the chair, was elevated in the audience so that everyone could see him. There is an extraordinary power of presence to be derived from sitting immobile in a Hollywood gathering of luvvies and hand-wringers. In tragedy, Reeves has achieved a stature and dignity elusive in the days when he was known only for being a 1970s Superman and appearing in a string of rotten movies.

  If only those around him would have picked up some tips in underplaying a scene. “Hope lights a candle instead of cursing the darkness,” sighed Winona Ryder moistly. A gentleman in the front row hobbled from the auditorium when a cliché accidentally rolled from the stage and crushed his foot.

  Amy Grant sang a song, the first line of which began: “Sometimes it’s hard to remember to keep your feet on the ground.” Reeves blinked in surprise, or perhaps indignation.

  Willy Nelson arrived to strum a, er, foot-tapping tune, which must have made Chris wish he’d lost sensation in his ears too. Jane Seymour flowed on stage, serene as a bottle of hair conditioner, seemingly thinking everyone was there to see her. She started talking about “a movie I acted in with Chris, called Somewhere in Time”.

  Everyone clapped, as they did every time Reeve’s name was mentioned. “Oh, thank you,” said Jane coyly. Everyone frowned. “I know it’s a great favourite of many people,” she gushed, perhaps thinking of the same people who consider Chains of Gold to be John Travolta’s best movie.

  It’s an unworthy thought, but I can never escape the feeling that charity events are more for the benefit of the charitable donors than for the recipients. It was a thought that stayed with me at the climax of the show, when Reeve was wheeled on stage. The audience rose to give him a standing ovation. A particularly thoughtless tribute, I would have said.

  • Hot Medium’s I’m-Doing-Anything-To-Avoid-Writing-About-Christmas Award for the most careless television commentary goes to Mungo Poore, reporting on the Sterkfontein fossils on the 8pm News (SABC3): “When the hominid fell into these caves,” opined Mungo thoughtfully, “he probably had no idea of the fuss he would cause three-and-a-half-million years later.” Mungo, that’s probably true.

  Darker side of Christmas lurks in every living room

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 27 DECEMBER 1998

  CHRISTMAS IS THE great leveller. Perhaps if I had risen from a Muslim tradition I would be writing: “Eid is the great leveller”; but such are the vagaries of birth and life.

  It is easy to be flippant about Christmas, to make sly references to Boney M and that new terror from the north, Helmut Lotti, to dwell on the Coca-Cola origins of Santa Claus and his red-and-white suit, but ultimately Christmas, with its memories and hopes and its excessive consumption of cheap sparkling wine from glasses bought at Clicks, comes down to one thing: fear. Christmas is the great celebration of deep, unshakeable, inescapably personalised fear.

  Whether it be fear of the past or fear of not being able to recreate the past, our frenzies of eating, buying, drinking, remembering, forgetting are driven by the ghastly apprehension that we are alone, that childhood has gone, that that fugitive sip of champagne at the lunch table between the first cracker and the first roast potato will never again taste as good as when we were not allowed to take it.

  I have in my possession a small plastic compass that came tumbling from a Christmas cracker when I was a chubby lad of nine, testing my strength against my sad-eyed Aunty Lynn, who wore too much make-up, even for the 1970s, and always smelt inexplicably of Old Spice. The needle of the compass was wobbly, but always pointed north, no matter which way I twisted it. Even at the bottom of the next-door neighbours’ swimming pool, with a large magnet and, for some reason, a brick, that needle never moved away from the big N.

  “At least you’ll never be lost,” lied Aunty Lynn. “And you’ll always be able to find your way home.”

  It was an obvious lie – a lie that became increasingly more obvious as I grew older – but at least it was a comforting one. I will take one comforting untruth over a thousand desolate honesties. That is what I appreciated about Aunty Lynn – for all her unsettling personal characteristics and easily imagined personal unhappiness, she was a comforting figure. Isabel Jones is like that too.

  Aunty Isabel is a true South African hero – the local equivalent of the men of 911, or a similar service in a fantasy world where free, speedy, efficient assistance is but a phone call away. Whenever I shut my eyes and think about the nativity – an increasingly less frequent occurrence – the three wise men always have the faces of Desmond Tutu, Willem Heath and Isabel Jones.

  Isabel was doing her bit for the festive season this week on Fair Deal (SABC3, Mondays, 6.15pm). Her target, for a change, wasn’t a swindler, charlatan or mail-order shyster but mince pies, traditionally a subject of some indifference in the Hot Medium household.

  Mince pies, I have always felt, are the unwelcome relatives at the Christmas table. While not exactly prone to getting drunk, feeling up the host’s wife and telling loud stories about the good old days in Rhodesia, they still don’t really fit in, do they? Offering neither the comfort of a solid meat-’n-potatoes scoff, nor the hot, silently screaming fuzziness of a healthy tot of Yuletide spirit, they seem to lurk without fixed intent, undesired, a strange remnant of someone else’s idea of Christmas.

  “Ooh, I couldn’t possibly, I’ve had so much already” – those are the words most familiar to the veteran mince pie who’s seen a Christmas or two in its time.

  Undaunted, Isabel rounded up a trio of what she called “celebrities” to blind-taste a selection of retail pies. Mark Gillman was one, and a pair of actors from Isidingo (SABC3, weekdays, 6.30pm) were the others. That should tell you something about how many celebrities hang around in Johannesburg over the Christmas season.

  They boldly tucked into their samples. “The pastry’s crumbly,” complained the first Isidingo gourmet.

  “The pastry’s supposed to be crumbly,” murmured Isabel diplomatically.

  “I’ve never tasted a mince pie before,” mentioned the second connoisseur. Isabel smiled bravely.

  Gillman, meanwhile, was fumbling for some wackiness. His entire radio career is built upon the twin pillars of being wacky and shouting into the microphone. On television you are not allowed to shout into the microphone. “This mince pie tastes like … tastes like … this!” he mugged, grabbing something from the table in front of him. Unfortunately the camera failed to follow his hand, so we will never know what he grabbed. I suspect, however, it was another mince pie. How Isabel must have wished she was still dealing with swindlers, charlatans and mail-order shysters.

  On Christmas Eve I shunned SABC’s various treasure troves of festive tunes (if it’s not sung by Sacha Distel, I just ain’t interested), and turned instead to the baubly wonders of satellite. Sadly, there was no Christmas Channel – which makes me wonder exactly how the Osmonds make a living these days – but I happily settled down to The Wizard of Oz (TNT Classic Movies, 11pm).

  I have always considered The Wizard to be a far more appropriate Christmas film than those other staples, The Sound of Music (in which Julie Andrews tries to sing the Nazis into submission) and It’s
A Wonderful Life (in which Jimmy Stewart demonstrates the socially productive aspects of attempted suicide).

  It is an unsettling film. Things stir beneath the surface of the story – fearful things, only half-apprehended by children, and the more powerful for that. With its witches and flying monkeys and unreasonably cheerful midgets, there is a dark shadow rimming the candy colours and heel-kicking tunes of Oz. It is, I think, the shadow of adulthood, of the farm back in Kansas with its mortgage and its freak tornadoes and failed crops.

  Watching the young Judy Garland, pumped to the pigtails with diet pills and amphetamines, turning her face to the skies and to the future, yearning to be somewhere over the rainbow, I couldn’t stop myself whispering: “Stay right where you are, babe.”

  A night with Monica Lewinsky

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 14 MARCH 1999

  WHEN I WAS 11, as cute as a grazed elbow in short pants and haversack, dreaming of growing up to be an ichthyologist or Joe Hardy or, in my more solitary moments, that woman from the Morkels advert, I conceived a fascination for a girl in my class. In fact, we all did, after it became known that Shirley Whiteside had gone all the way with Craig Barnsley, an oafish youth in Standard 5 who, with an unrelated passion, used to waylay me on the way home and make me eat grasshoppers.

  I had only a fuzzy grasp of what going all the way might entail. Surely Shirley didn’t actually swallow the grasshoppers? (I used to stow their chewed-up corpses under my tongue, grinning and mumbling with a studious nonchalance, then covertly spit them out once Barnsley had released the downward pressure on the back of my head. It is a technique that even today serves me well in editorial conferences.)