But I Digress ... Read online

  Still, Shirley was pretty hot stuff among the boys of Mrs Kincaid’s form class – we speculated endlessly about the events of that hot Durban afternoon beneath the frangipani tree while Mr and Mrs Whiteside were at work. Steven Kenton thought it had happened in the shady ditch behind the woodwork room, but no one ever listened to Steven Kenton.

  Shirley was the focus of a small-boy curiosity of almost unbearable intensity. I would lie awake at night in a restless fever – in the morning the sweat stains on the pillow (if you tilted your head and squinched up your eyes) described the silhouette of Shirley Whiteside. When she played those mysterious games on the playground with the other girls, involving a length of elastic and plenty of squeals, her calves flexed unfathomably and her ponytail shimmied and trembled with the impenetrable secrets of adulthood.

  Happily, I never learnt what went on at the bottom of the Whitesides’ garden. As a result, my imagination prospered, and the sticky, tawdry disappointments of grown-ups had to wait until I was, well, grown up. And a good thing too – adolescence would have been positively unbearable without the comforting throb of itchy-fingered anticipation.

  All of which may do little to explain why I felt so unshakeably empty and depressed while watching Jon Snow interview Monica Lewinsky last Sunday (Carte Blanche, M-Net, 7pm). “You have the right to see it all” is Carte Blanche’s oft-repeated motto, a sentiment with which I am in hearty disagreement.

  Frankly, the world would be a great deal more attractive with a few more veils and secrets and frilly petticoats, several degrees more appealing if it maintained hidden areas of tangled undergrowth and deep shade, dark places where daylight never reaches.

  The Lewinsky affair, of course, was never the stuff that dreams or fantasies are made of. It was a tatty little episode, as dull and workaday as a suburban husband flirting with his neighbour’s wife over the Sunday afternoon braai, as routinely tiresome as an attractive woman being interviewed by Tony Sanderson. It would be dreary enough to watch it unfold in real life; to watch it on television was to feel one’s own life shrink to the stature of a dripping garden tap.

  There was a listless diversion in spotting how many sexual double entendres Snow could weasel into the interview (“What did you hope would flow from the relationship?”), but the pleasure soon congealed.

  There was a brief interest in determining which of the two better carried their weight. Monica, though looking as slinky as a bag of charcoal briquettes tied in the middle, edged a narrow victory by virtue of her tactically sound legs-crossed position, which broke up her outline; Snowie just slouched in his chair with his belly thundering upwards like the dome on Capitol Hill.

  There was even the perverse entertainment of watching Derek Watts acting like some husky-voiced shill for a Mills and Boon serial at each ad break: “He needed lovin’, she was ready to oblige,” Derek twinkled throatily. “After the break we pick up the story!”

  But these were temporary pleasures. Ultimately nothing could disguise the fact that we were watching a perfectly ordinary young woman describing a depressingly ordinary encounter with her boss. “Did you feel a sexual connection?” demanded Snow delicately.

  “Yes,” she said patiently.

  “Did it make you tingle?” said Snow, drawing on a lifetime’s experience of cheap soap operas.

  “Tee-hee,” said Monica Lewinsky.

  Snow’s high-school debating-club gravitas rapidly became comical. “The sex was very one-way, if I may put it in a male sense,” he murmured, smoothing his tie. Monica frowned, as though displeased at the thought of him putting it at all.

  “He was a quarter of a century older than you,” persisted Snowie gravely, for all the world as though discussing a matter of international importance.

  “Oh, but age is just a number representing how long you have been on the planet,” said Monica confidently. There was no arguing with that.

  She was likeable enough, was Monica, and bright in a general sort of way. She was the girl you see in orientation week at university – keen, well groomed, eager to be liked, drinking too much peach schnapps and giggling while she puts her hands in some postgraduate’s trouser pockets. Her ordinariness was too stark; it made our voyeurism too suburban. If we’re going to feel cheap, let us at least be entertained. Let’s have some sensation in our sensationalism.

  Everybody loves Oscar

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 28 MARCH 1999

  IF AN OSCAR ceremony was held in a forest, and there was no one around to see it, would Tom Hanks’ wife really exist? There are many arguments for holding Oscar ceremonies in forests – it would teach those wattle-and-daub Knysna hippies a damn good lesson, for one thing – but the prospect of Tom’s foolery evaporating in a puff and a sniffle is perhaps the most appealing.

  Hanks himself hogged a good deal of camera time during Oscars 99 (M-Net, Monday, 8pm). There he lurked like a sinister scoutmaster in the second row, dewy-eyed and dimpling and practising the secret cub-scout handshake on himself. In a misguided effort to butch up, he has grown a scrappy new beard, which doesn’t so much create the effect of a rugged leading man as much as it does a hairy eraser at the end of a pencil.

  The Oscars play an important role in our collective sense of well-being. Far more revealing than paparazzi snapshots of Kate Winslet without her make-up or John Travolta without his cigarette, they offer a fleeting glimpse of what stars are like when they write their own scripts. Always remember Hot Medium’s first law of social success: under no circumstances appear in public without a script. Spontaneity requires practice, and original thought is like original sin – it only ever happened once, a long time ago, to someone who wasn’t you.

  Whoopi Goldberg, sad to say, did have a script, yet still contrived to throw me into the torments of embarrassment with which I suffer through bad speakers. For some reason she chose to punctuate every sentence with the word “honey!” (“Wooo, honey, this is going to be a long night!”), as though she were a bad drag act opening for Billy Ray Cyrus in a honky-tonk bar.

  Besides impersonal terms of endearment, there are two crimes unforgivable in a public speaker – one is repeatedly laughing at your own smutty jokes, and the other is noticing that no one else is laughing and demanding, like Whoopi: “Are you having a good time? Are you? Yeah!” All right!”

  Much like those other dreaded interrogations, “Do you remember what you did at the party last night?” and “Are you sure you love me?”, “Are you having a good time?” is a question only ever asked when the answer is bound to be roundly in the negative.

  Blessed relief from Whoopi-Cushion Goldberg was the delightful dance number, which demonstrated that choreographer Debbie Allen has lost none of the talent or taste that made Fame such a must-see programme in at least four households around the world in the mid-1980s. Let those who mock the artistic value of the Oscars watch a long-haired, bare-chested Spaniard tap-dance the theme song to Saving Private Ryan, and blush. When the dancer flexed his pectoral muscles in a moving tribute to the fallen soldiers, I could scarcely contain my bravos.

  But the magic of the Oscars lies in the winners’ speeches. My immediate delight that Tom Yanks didn’t win the best actor award was tempered by the realisation that Roberto Benigni had. Some may consider the chair-climbing antics of the excitable little continental chap charming, but I felt they lowered the class and tone that Debbie Allen’s dancers had tried so hard to establish. “I am surging with the love,” gurgled the little loon, once he’d made it up to the stage. “I am wanting to hug and kiss you all and put my tongue in your ears.” Perhaps Hanks had slipped something into his chianti.

  Steven Spielberg gave me pause for thought with his acceptance speech for best director. “I want to thank all the families who lost sons in the Second World War,” he declared. I wonder: what would be the correct response if you were one of the families being thus thanked? “It’s a pleasure” seems insincere. “Not at all, any time” likewise. Perhaps “Don’t mention it” might be c
losest to the mark.

  Anyway, it all paled next to Gwyneth Poltroon’s speech. Even Whoopi paled next to that speech. As poised and gracious as a block of processed cheese, as concise and pleasing as a song by Celine Dion, it had me regretting that Benigni couldn’t have won best actress too. It was fun counting how many different people in her speech she loved “more than anything in the world”, but it did become a little morbid when she thanked her cousin Keith, who’d been dead these past years. “I miss you, Keith,” she declared into the cameras, which raised the inevitable questions about whether the dearly departed watch the Oscars, and if so, whether M-Net or SABC3’s coverage is favoured in the afterlife. I am inclined towards M-Net – it may be more long-winded than the SABC’s edited highlights, but you’ve got to pass the time in eternity somehow.

  Starship Election: Space 1999

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 6 JUNE 1999

  THE DEVIL HAS all the best tunes, M-Net has all the best sport, but the SABC – bless ’em – had the 1999 elections. I woke at 7.45 on Tuesday morning and turned on the telly, just in time to hear Vuyo Mbuli say: “The time is now 6.45.”

  Vuyo, looking neat and shiny as a newly peeled egg, was the left prong of the Election ’99 broadcasting trident; Nadia Levin, looking confidently bouffant, was the right: but the real star of the show was the IEC centre, lurking in the background with screens flickering and counters turning, like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. It has been a long time since an SABC production had such a lavish set, and Vuyo and Nadia weren’t about to let the moment pass unnoticed.

  “Here we are in the very hub of the elections,” said Vuyo, for the first of many times.

  “Yes, Vuyo, this is indeed the very hub,” agreed Nadia.

  “Everyone here has a chair,” marvelled Vuyo, as the camera panned over rows of empty seating.

  It was true: even Graeme Hart, the weather guy, had his own chair. Unfortunately, he didn’t have his own microphone. His voice was like the faraway grumble of an approaching drought. When they did manage to mike him up, his voice was sombre in its appreciation of the magnitude of his meteorological contribution to democracy. Bereft of visuals, he was forced to make the climate come alive with facial expressions.

  Fortunately for Graeme and viewer alike, the weather was fine. He hunched unhappily in his chair, blazer ruffling about his neck. There is nothing more poignant than a weather guy without his synoptic chart.

  Nor was Vuyo inclined to let the humiliation end there. “I’ve been watching Graeme for years,” he announced jovially, “and he always does it standing up. Maybe Nadia can discuss with him what it’s like to do it sitting down.” If she had, I would have lodged an official complaint with the IEC. Wisely, the broken Hart made subsequent appearances squarely on two feet.

  The SABC’s was an ambitious operation, with outside units, roving reporters, even the odd bar graph. Yet more impressively, the presenters have picked up an international tip or two: they shrewdly adopted the CNN strategy of spending far more time telling us what in-depth coverage we’re getting, than actually providing coverage itself.

  Mind you, there wasn’t much coverage to give. To the great satisfaction of everyone who isn’t a journalist, the elections were as marrow-achingly boring as elections should be. Still, Vuyo soldiered forth undaunted.

  “We’ve had some exciting moments already,” he enthused. “Just now we saw Bantu Holomisa cast his vote!” As a highlight, it was meagre pickings, but we watched it over and again throughout the next hour, in glorious slow motion. Oh, wait a minute, that’s not slow motion, that’s the normal speed at which people vote. I can think of very few people who could make the act of dropping a slip of paper into a cardboard box look interesting. Grethe Fox, maybe, and Walter Matthau. John Cleese, if he did that funny walk. Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Bantu Holomisa? No.

  For variety, the studio kept optimistically crossing to Jessica Pitchford in a helicopter. “What does election day look like from the air?” Nadia asked from the very hub of the elections. Jessica chattered away, but she must have been borrowing Graeme Hart’s microphone. We sat staring at the skyline of Pretoria, hearing only the mocking whirr of rotor blades. From that vantage point, election day looked much like any other. A cloud drifted by, but I was inclined to ignore it.

  Eventually Jessica’s voice crackled into life: “We’re flying over the IEC, the very hub of the elections …” Down in the very nerve centre, Vuyo and Nadia had developed the unpleasant habit of crossing for regional updates.

  That left those of us in Gauteng in the company of what appeared to be a pair of dressmaker’s dummies in air-stewardess’s uniforms. They were identified as Paula Slier and Noxolo Grootboom. Noxolo was the one whose lips had to be manually operated by the sound engineer; Paula was the one with the pop-eyed manner of a trout who’d been stunned by a blow from a grizzly bear. They eyed the camera in rubbery silence, as though afraid it might make an improper advance.

  Embarrassingly, due to a technical glitch, the viewers could hear all the instructions the producer was murmuring into Paula and Noxolo’s earpieces. Political analyst Sheila Meintjies stopped speaking. Paula goggled at her piscatorially.

  “Thank you, Sheila,” crackled the producer’s voice.

  “Thank you, Sheila,” wobbled Paula.

  “Now you, Noxolo.”

  “Thank you, Sheila.”

  Finally they could take it no more. “Let’s cross to Jessica Pitchford, our eye in the sky.”

  There followed the familiar sound of rotor blades, then: “Yes, hi, we’re flying over the IEC, the very hub of the elections.”

  Every so often, a music video was played. It was always a song called “The Rainbow Nation”, rendered by two Spur waiters in black pullovers. Their accompaniment was a reedy tune picked out on an E-Zee-Play Organola. Their names, if you can believe it, were Bobo and Kellam. “The world is awakening,” they crooned, as though masked intruders were tampering with their ingrown toenails, “to a global fee-ee-dom!” By all that’s holy, who could like that song?

  Back to the studio. “I really like that song,” said Nadia.

  Oh, there were wondrous times in the very hub of the elections, but by the time Vuyo and Nadia moved over to make space for Alyce Chavunduka, the fun was draining away. Without Vuyo’s shiny dome to light the way, it all became a little dreary. There was simply no news worth reporting. By Friday, the circus had left town. “Welcome again from the IEC,” said Vuyo, “a very hive of activity.” I could take a hint.

  When a hub is no longer a hub, it’s time to leave.

  I am Wat Siam – TV in Thailand

  SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 9 JANUARY 2000

  ON THE NIGHT before Christmas I hired a high-prowed wooden fishing boat and put out through the breakers, skimming fast across the surface of the Andaman Sea, as warm and dark as a glass of mulled red wine. The wake swirled and gleamed with faint phosphorescence, like the distant glimmer of the lights from a department-store Christmas tree that had slipped overboard and lay unravelled across the sea-bed. The moonlight danced on the sea like tinsel. After an hour I arrived at Buddha Island, a tiny, unlit dot off the west coast of Thailand. I made my gift of bottled water and loaves of rye bread and a small tub of Philadelphia cream cheese to the head monk. He spoke no English, and my Thai should be punished with a coconut-husk flail and sharpened length of bamboo, so the boatman translated as we stood under the rushing, swaying hurricane palms in the uncanny glow of a tropical full moon.

  It is a tradition in these parts to bring gifts to the monastery, and to ask the head monk, who has a reputation for knowledge beyond ordinary ken, questions of the future. My principal curiosity concerned the cricket score, but while the Buddha was undoubtedly wise and good and even fun-loving, there was no suggestion He was a cricket fan.

  “What can I expect from the new year?” I asked instead. The head monk looked at me narrowly, and pulled his saffron robes close about him. “Is it new year already?” he s
aid. He was perhaps 60, but his muscles were taut and alive, like a school of fast-swimming ocean fish in a surgical glove. He was a persuasive advertisement for the clean life, or at least the life lived far from other people. He placed a hand on my upper arm and frowned. “Beware,” he said, “of lawsuits.”

  It was an alarming thing to hear, so far from Jani Allan and the SABC, but southeast Asia is a place of surprises. It is also a good place for Yule-phobes such as myself to spend the season. The only sign of Christmas against which I stubbed my toe was a tinny album of carols playing in a department store in Kuala Lumpur.

  The album was recorded by a Thai pub band specialising in Western music, which perhaps explained why it sounded as though a plantation of annoyed dwarfs were yelling “Sirent night! Hory night!” I bought my souvenir gift hamper of Malaysian rubber and fled. Behind me the dwarfs were building to a frenzy: “I’ll pray my dlum for him, pa-lum-pa-pum-pum!”

  It has been quite some journey to the east, but by the time you read this I shall be home. As I write, a water buffalo grazes in a rice paddy outside my window, and if I look to the left I can see a clipper in white sail following the current down to the Straits of Malacca and into the China Seas. I came in search of television, but I found the footprints of authors.

  In the Bangkok Oriental hotel I took tea in the suite in which Somerset Maugham nearly died of malaria, and stood on the spot where Joseph Conrad slumped to the ground after too many rum toddies. In Singapore’s Raffles I drank a gin sling on the porch where Noel Coward sat shuddering with dengue fever. I rode the same rails as Graham Greene up the Malaysian peninsula, and slept in the same compartment of the Orient Express that Wilbur Smith once infested. I tried to change compartments, but nothing doing.

  Which is not to say that I entirely neglected my television duties. TV, unlike the portions served in local restaurants, is big in the Orient. On the River Kwai, barely 500m downstream from the infamous and strangely unimpressive bridge, a nearby settlement is visible only by the tangled thicket of television aerials rising above the bamboo and banana fronds. In the villages and farmsteads lining the railway through the Malaysian jungle, every small stilted shack housing rubber tappers and dirt-scrabble palm growers has a rickety aerial receiving all that local television has to offer.