"But I Digress ..." (3 page)

That's no duck, that's Ally McVeal

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 28 JUNE 1998

S
HOULD THE SPOOKY
day come that I accidentally receive a transfusion of blood from Felicia, and find myself suddenly taking seriously Oprah's suggestion that we all keep Gratitude Diaries, my first entry will be: I am very grateful that I don't know anyone who even vaguely resembles Ally McBeal.

Ally McBeal
(SABC3, Mondays, 9.30pm) is rapidly gathering something approaching popularity among 20- and 30-something white South Africans. Set in what I gather is a Canadian law firm, it is billed as a sophisticated sitcom. By “sophisticated” I presume they mean it doesn't have a laugh track. As for the sitcom, I see plenty of sitting but precious little comedy.

The show is a kind of three-step guide to first-year philosophy, a fabric-softened, tumble-dried wrangle with ethics, existentialism and Humean uncertainty. Like the academic career of many a feeble BA student, it takes its entire dramatic impetus from Ally's utter inability to make up her mind. Should I laugh? Should I cry? Should I pout more? Could I pout more? The next time I speak, should I finish one sentence before starting another? These are not, sadly, questions that ever receive the correct answer.

“Hi, I just wanted to … if you're sure you're not busy … because if you are I can come back some other … no really, it's no problem … oh, if you're really sure … if you're sure you're sure … ha ha … just wanted to say, you know, good morning.”

Ally is played with diffident blankness by one Calista Flockhart, a name to give anyone an existential crisis. I don't like saying her name out loud – it sounds like a remedy for the kind of intimate female condition I'm not at all comfortable talking about.

She has two methods of dramatising her various crises of confidence. In the first, popular in some households, she blinks while pouting into the middle distance. In the other, a favourite in my neighbourhood, she blinks while pouting at the floor. You can almost hear the self-help mantra in her head:
I blink, therefore I am
.

Perhaps the greatest entertainment the show offers is the intellectual and aesthetic challenge of deciding precisely which barnyard animal it is that Ms Flockhart so closely resembles.

General consensus tips the poultry family, with the proud goose topping the polls, though the humble duck is rallying strongly, but I favour another of our farmhouse friends. Those languorously curling lashes, those curiously motile lips, that intolerable slowness of reaction – that's no duck, that's Ally McVeal.

It's astonishing, this ethic of agonising self-doubt with which the Americans infect our TV screens. Ally is just the latest in a noisome line of long-faced whiners who don't know how to be happy. From
thirtysomething
in the eighties to the latest baby-cursed series of
Mad About You
, we are subjected to an unending stream of self-consciousness, a narcissistic dissection of every impulse, obsession and pre-packaged emotion they can scrounge together.

Small wonder that women are reading books about running with wolves, and men have to take Viagra – there are no simple pleasures left in sitcom land. It's a fidgety, squirmy, over-refined world in which “because I enjoy it” isn't a good enough answer any more.

That's why
Seinfeld
(SABC3, Thursdays, 9.30pm) will be so sorely missed. It's not that prissy Jerry who makes the show, nor Elaine, nor even the all-powerful Kramer. No, it's George who gives us hope each Thursday – George Costanza, the most sneaky, selfish, amoral, un-self-doubting liar and cheat ever to grace the small screen with his sly, balding schemes. George is everyman – he is you, he is me, in our weak, beery, most conscience-free moments he is everything we want to be. He is the Wizard of Id.

Down the hatch with Keith Floyd

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 5 JULY 1998

I
'
M NOT MUCH
of a cook. Washing dishes, yes – it is soothing, sensual and one of the few activities besides shaving off your moustache that offers you both immediate solitude and the subsequent gratitude of others. In addition – shameful confession – there is something nostalgically comforting about the amniotic warmth of the suds.

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

T
O 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 time 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.