"But I Digress ..." (14 page)

Big Brother Iraq

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 23 MARCH 2003

‘A
S I SPEAK
to you, every part of my body is entirely sealed!” said Emma in the northern Kuwaiti desert. I couldn't be sure it was true – Sky News' coverage of the war in the Gulf, while impressively thorough, couldn't take us
that
far into the heart of the campaign.

Emma was a frightening sight – in her head-to-toe charcoal-lined camouflage protective suit and her weirdly anachronistic gas mask, she resembled some sort of paramilitary Womble. Throughout the day, whenever we crossed to the troops in northern Kuwait, Emma was either struggling into her protective gear or wriggling from it, the cold and fearful sound of the gas-alert siren or – almost indistinguishable – the all-clear in the background. On one occasion we crossed over to find that Emma had taken refuge in the bunker. The camera, fixed on its tripod, impassively showed distant men running, shouting, affixing their gas masks, kicking up small clouds of desert sand. For a terrible, terrible moment before sanity reasserted itself I leant closer to the screen, hoping something exciting might be about to happen. For that dreadful moment I forgot I was watching a war. It was as though I were watching
Big Brother Iraq
.

The 24-hour multi-channel coverage of operations in Iraq is even more surreal than coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. The various international news channels this time were better prepared, with journalists on the front lines, on aircraft carriers, attached to infantry units and tank divisions. The news-gathering and news-transmission operations are as carefully planned and executed as the military procedures themselves. What's worse, with 10 years of Reality TV conditioning the way we experience real life and television – and real life on television – it becomes increasingly difficult not to treat the coverage as another species of entertainment, an unfolding saga with twists and turns and unexpected surprises.

Since Thursday morning the war has been playing itself out in our living rooms like an elaborate drama series, complete with theme music and credits and titles and celebrity guests and constant scrolling updates on the story so far. Strangely, having reporters there on the ground, speaking into the microphone with one hand blocking an ear against the noise of a Cobra helicopter gunship passing overhead, saying things like “There has been a fire-fight on the outskirts of Basra, just a few kilometres from here”, somehow does not make the war more real. It makes it seem like any other Reality show. We have seen so much on television pretending to be real, these last years, that nothing on television feels real any more.

Once again, Sky News has edged out the competition at CNN and BBC World in the battle of the broadcasters. While the others lapse occasionally into logos and channel idents and – CNN's speciality – inserts explaining just how they have managed to set up their cameras and where the broadcasting unit is located, Sky's coverage – or “intelligence”, I suppose you would say – has all the depth and variety you expect from modern war coverage. Plus, there is the quirky pleasure of hearing the Sky reporters refer to the “Dee-Em-Zed”, instead of the Americans' “Dee-Em-Zee”.

I made some slight attempt to watch the local channels, but I was defeated. When I crossed over to e.tv, some local worthy was explaining to Debra Patta how the working classes of South Africa were going to bring the Bush regime to its knees by “boycotting American movies and American oil”. Over on SABC3, we were talking to Rene Horne, live in Baghdad. “It's very tense here,” said Rene Horne, half a day after the first missiles started landing in Baghdad. “Almost like a war zone.”

When the war first started I was jumping from one channel to the next – like the multi-camera views in the
Big Brother
house – but now I seldom budge from Sky. Oh yes, when men in distant parts are killing each other, I demand nothing but the best.

Intimations of mortuaries

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 6 APRIL 2003

I
DO HOPE YOU
can read this column today – if the writing is too faint and spidery and trails away, I can only offer my apologies and the assurance that it won't go on forever. I am getting older, you see, and my hand is not as firm nor as steady as once it was. Today is my birthday, and at my back I have the distinct impression that I hear the snorts and whinnies and muffled hoofbeats of time's winged chariot drawing near. Either that, or the neighbour has made up with her boyfriend again.

And yet I am not downcast. Age creeps up on one, like a Gurkha in the jungles of Malaya, belly-down in the tropical ferns and a kukri between his teeth, but not everything that stirs in the night is an assassin. I am in good spirits today. I greet the advancing world with a smile and a whistle and I offer it a sip of my drink. The rest of the year is for worrying; on your birthday you deserve a break.

In the run-up to my birthday, I must confess, my mind has been turning to matters of mortality. Last Monday I tuned in to
Six Feet Under
(e.tv, Mondays, 9pm), to see what insights I could glean.
Six Feet Under
– a sort of quirky American drama series set in a family mortuary – is gathering some sort of international cult momentum. It is billed as a black comedy because it has dead people in it and because it has moments of idiosyncrasy. Idiosyncrasy is what people without humour offer when they want to be amusing but they don't want to crack one-liners or tell jokes.

The show is written by Alan Ball, who won an Oscar for writing
American Beauty
. I was never that impressed with the script for
American Beauty
. That famous scene in which the gawky teenage boy shows Thora Birch the video-tape of a plastic packet blowing in the wind only worked for me because that is precisely the kind of self-conscious, inarticulate groping for an arresting point of view that is characteristic of gawky teenage boys who have spent too much time on their own, and most of that time hoping that they are in some way special. (I say “they”, though of course I mean “we”.) “There is so much beauty in the world,” says the gawky teenage boy mistily, looking at the footage of the plastic bag, “I don't know if I can take it.”

I would be far more impressed by the scene if I could shake the nagging suspicion that Allan Ball intends us to take the gawky teenage boy and his plastic bag seriously. Certainly audiences around the world did take it seriously, and loved it, but that is not always the writer's fault. In this case, though, I think the writer was with his audience all the way. There is a lumbering, over-obvious earnestness about the story and its so-called twists which, if it isn't a case of ultra-ultra-refined satire, are so dull as to paralyse the brain.

I have the same feeling with
Six Feet Under
. It is a series about people straining to make sense of their lives against the perpetual dark backcloth of death. As are we all. But – aha! – the show takes place in a funeral parlour. See! Death is all around us! The death, I can't shake the feeling, is there in the way that Death or Sin or Virtue appeared in medieval morality plays – to spell itself out so obviously that even the most chuckleheaded viewer can't miss the point. Even worse, in this particular version of black comedy, the dead people provide all the blackness and all the comedy, and that is really why the show does not work for me.

The comic vision, and especially the black comic vision, is one that – if it is genuine – permeates the entire story and its characterisations. It has many forms and avatars, depending on whose vision it is, but one of its consistent qualities is a sense of the ridiculous that comes of human beings' attempts to take themselves and their doings seriously.

I say “seriously”, but really I mean “earnestly” or “self-importantly”. It is possible to be simultaneously comic and serious; it is possible to perceive absurdity while believing that one's relationship with absurdity is a matter that has meaning.
Six Feet Under
is not black comedy, it is a drama series that regards itself with a great deal of self-importance.

Death is in the script simply to provide macabre gags and to provide the silvering on the mirrors in which the characters endlessly examine themselves in a series of interminable monologues posing as conversations. There is a thumping predictability, as though it were written by a gifted teenager who still has the gifted teenager's blight of imagining that he is the first to have discovered the tortured minutiae of hormonal existentialism.

Six Feet Under
is not bad television. Indeed, it is because it is good television that I have taken it sufficiently seriously to figure out why I don't like it. There is pleasure in that. Of course, bad television has its own pleasures – they are fugitive pleasures but none the less welcome. This is the 300th column I have written in this newspaper about the variegated pleasures of watching television, and I thank you for reading them. I don't imagine you have read all 300 – not even I have read all 300, and my mother certainly hasn't – but every bit helps. I can't imagine that I shall write another 300 columns – there are younger television viewers out there with sharper eyes and tongues and newfangled palmtops in which to take their notes, rather than a tatty notebook and a leaking biro. But I have enjoyed being here, and if you will have me, I shall stick around a little longer yet.

Never mind Willy – free Harry

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 29 JUNE 2003

P
RINCE WILLIAM TURNED
21
this week, which didn't really come as a surprise. It had to happen sooner or later, and this was as good a week as any. To mark the occasion, M-Net screened
The Reluctant Royal
, a documentary about, well, Will. How reluctant is Will? He is so reluctant he didn't appear in the documentary at all, except in file footage and old clips of him as a jolly toddler, all kitted out in stripy jersey and tiny red shorts. It was quite sweet to see – I had forgotten how much Prince William, aged four, looked like Simon Gear, aged now.

Despite not having an actual prince to talk to, the documentary did all it could. What it could do was footage of fringe. Oh, he has a mighty fringe, does William. We saw the fringe from all angles. We saw it from above, from the side, from the other side. We didn't see it from a Will's eye-view, of course, because Will is very reluctant. His reluctance extends to cameras being strapped to his forehead.

So there was no Will-cam, but it was an impressive fringe, if you like fringes. It was the kind of fringe I spent years envying as a schoolboy. All the cool kids in Durban had fringes like that – they hung down and you could look through them, and the cool kids could flick them back with a toss of the head. The really cool kids could stick out their lower lips and blow upwards, and the fringe would levitate. I never had such a fringe. My hair was of the wrong sort. It waved when it should have flopped. It had too much relationship with gravity. That is one of the reasons I resent Oprah. Whenever she says: “You can be anything you want to be”, I always want to reply: “Oh yeah? Well, I want to have a fringe like Prince William's. Or like Stuart Wright, who sat two desks down in Mr Nupen's history class.”

There were times when the documentary succeeded in its primary task: winning our sympathy for the reluctant prince. It is not really in my nature to have much fellow-feeling for some tall, rich, befringed future king. Seldom do I think of William and sigh aloud, “Poor bugger.” Rarely do I look up from the muddle and murk of my life and think: “Could be worse. At least I'm not heir to the throne of Windsor.” But perhaps I should, because it can't be all fun. A moment in the show brought that home.

There was old footage of Diana on holiday in the Caribbean with her young sons. They were splashing at the sea's edge, laughing, happy together. The water was blue and the sun danced on the surface and made their fringes shine like electrum. “Not such a bad life,” I thought.

At that moment the camera pulled back to a wider angle. There, perched like strange beaked birds behind a line drawn in the sand perhaps 15 metres from the family, were all the photographers of the world, four deep, jostling and leaning over each other, snapping and snapping and snapping. I looked at William again. “Poor bugger,” I thought.

The show had its share of drama. “William is the Royal Family's last hope!” said the voice-over, sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi discussing Luke Skywalker. “But first he must come to terms with his destiny!”

Epic stuff, but still I can't get that interested in him. He is just about as dull as I suppose a future king of England has to be. There is another character I find far more intriguing.

He is there in all the file footage of William, but instead of occupying centre screen, blond and radiant like a sun, he is a dark, brooding smudge at the edges, his mood unreadable, like a cloud gathering but not yet large enough to threaten. Harry has the makings of a Shakespearean character: dark, inward, bearing an almost embarrassing resemblance to James Hewitt, orbiting ever on the fringes of the Windsor solar system.

While William wears chinos and simpers for the camera, I imagine Harry stalking the gardens thinking furious thoughts, brooding on his uncertain blood, absent-mindedly strangling baby birds and crushing small mammals beneath his heel. One day, like Mordred, he will leave the kingdom and raise a mighty army in exile, always dreaming of the day he will return … or perhaps it's just me.

2

Lifestyle

Of mice and morons

STYLE, SEPTEMBER 2000

H
AVE YOU NOTICED
how stupid the world is becoming? Well, not the world, exactly – the world, while not necessarily one's first choice as an after-dinner speaker, has come up with some nifty ideas in its time. Plate tectonics was a pretty shrewd manoeuvre, and the condensation cycle generally earns nods of approval in all the right circles. No, I mean the people who inhabit the world.

Stupidity is everywhere. It is the air we breathe. There are, of course, many shades of the stupid. I don't mean the recognisable stupidity of drooling, slack-jawed incomprehension, although, as anyone who has ever watched SABC1 will tell you, there is plenty of that shuffling around. Far more depressing is the stupidity that disguises itself as thought, that talks so glibly and eloquently – indeed, that never stops talking. How powerful is this species of stupidity? It is so powerful it has invented a genre of literature that actually makes people more stupid for having read it.

I was rictally grinning my way through a dinner party recently, when conversation turned, like a deflating boerewors on a suburban braai, to the subject of self-help. For some reason those beyond help are always talking about self-help. They can't help themselves. A young lady of doubtful provenance dipped into her handbag and hauled out a glossy paperback. “Read this!” she commanded. “It will change your life. It contains the lost wisdom of the ancient Mayans.” The book was called
The Avocado Prophecies
or
Footprints of the Toucans
or some such horsefeathers and flapdoodle. I fixed her with an eye both cold and unaccommodating. I have no patience with the cultural anthropology of loserdom.

Any curling potpourri of antiquated mysticism is celebrated nowadays, provided it can be attributed to the Incas or the Etruscans or some other culture that has disappeared with scarcely a trace. Besides celebrating communal cocaine use and the social merits of human sacrifice, what can the Mayans teach us now? How to be invaded by a rag-tag bunch of Spanish ruffians? If those ancient cultures were so damned clever, where are they now? Eh? Pyramids and maps of the stars are all very well, but they might have found the wheel a touch more useful in the long run.

Anthropological mysticism is but one rickety arm of the genre of quick-fire self-help. To sell an idea today, you simply have to tell people it will change their lives, and tell them it won't be hard. It's not stupid for people to believe in something better, but it is a very modern stupidity to believe it will come easy. The fashion for mainstream mysticism is not a swing away from religion as such, but away from systems of belief that require rigour and application.

Hence the popularity of faraway cultures – they don't have to make sense. In fact it's better that they don't. Modern folk are so hostile to thought, we'll put our faith in anything, provided it's not rational. With alternative medicine it's the alternative that attracts, not the medicine. No doubt sundry roots and tubers and suchlike have useful healing properties, but the way people go on you'd think that dangling crystals and painting your bedroom puce is guaranteed to work, for no other reason than that it hasn't been subjected to clinical testing.

The more non-rational a self-help book pretends to be, the more certain it is to succeed. We prefer anecdote and analogy to case studies and evidence. Invent a snappy metaphor and the crowds will flock. Consider the latest best-seller in the field:
Who Moved my Cheese?
by one Dr Spencer Johnson. It bills itself, and I'm not making this up, as the parable of four characters who live in a maze. Their lives are dedicated to the pursuit of, ahem, cheese. Apparently they like cheese. Two characters are mice named “Sniff” and “Scurry”. Two are miniature people named “Hem” and “Haw”. There's more, but I can't bring myself to utter it. Yet is this any more preposterous than a book titled
60 Ways to Make Your Life Amazing
? I doubt it.

And for all this hogwash and hoo-hah, are people noticeably wiser, kinder or more interesting dinner-party guests? They are not. I say to hell with this obsession with the real you. If you want the world to be a better place, don't try to be more true to yourself – try to be more polite. Say please and thank you, teach your children not to interrupt adults while they're talking, wear a jacket to dinner. Sod self-discovery, bring back manners. Imagine a day when every self-help book is replaced by a manual of common etiquette. Now there's a world I could live in.