“But I Digress …”
“But I Digress …”
A selection of his best columns
DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY
Published by Zebra Press
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Reg. No. 1966/003153/07
Wembley Square, First Floor, Solan Road, Gardens, Cape Town 8001
PO Box 1144, Cape Town 8000, South Africa
www.zebrapress.co.za
First published 2003
Publication © Zebra Press 2003
Text © Darrel Bristow-Bovey 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.
PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer
MANAGING EDITOR: Robert Plummer
PROOFREADER: Ronel Richter-Herbert
TEXT DESIGNER: Natascha Adendorff
TYPESETTER: Natascha Adendorff
ISBN 1 86872 669 1 (print)
ISBN 1 77022 310 3 (ePub)
ISBN 1 77022 311 0 (PDF)
Over 50 000 unique African images available to purchase
from our image bank at www.imagesofafrica.co.za
To those editors who made it easier to write:
Tony Proudlock, John Battersby, Andrew Walker, Jovial Rantao, Jeremy Gordin, Maureen Isaacson, Alf Hayter, Gus Silber, Jeremy Maggs, Chris Nicklin, Chris Roper, Kate Wilson, Louise Steyn, Mike Moon, Cara Bouwer, Peter Bruce, Clare O’Donoghue, Andy Davis, Brendon Cooper, Steve Pike, Fiona Zerbst, Katherine Butt, Collin Howell, Leverne Gething and of course the incomparable, inestimable and suavely cosmopolitan Robert Plummer.
But mostly to Robert Greig, arts-and-culture editor of The Sunday Independent, who for no good reason gave me my first writing job and my first column, and without whom I scarcely know where I would be now,
and
Marlene Fryer, who asked me to write my first book, thought up the subject for the first book and made sure that I wrote my first book. And the books since.
Contents
PREFACE
TELEVISION
Miss South Africa
Glued to our sets for Diana’s match and dispatch
Mother Teresa should have been blonde
Noot vir Noot – game show of the Galapagos
That’s no duck, that’s Ally McVeal
Down the hatch with Keith Floyd
The humiliations of charity
Darker side of Christmas lurks in every living room
A night with Monica Lewinsky
Everybody loves Oscar
Starship Election: Space 1999
I am Wat Siam – TV in Thailand
Fridges and fantasies
Missouri’s living dead elect one of their own
A Christmas story
The more the marrier
TV in Yemen
Father’s Day
Forget phobias, find a fix for Felicia
The highs and lows of weather
Oh brother, Big Brother
September 11
Not even St Helena offers safe haven
It takes a lot of money to look this cheap
Survivor: Africa
What is Mark’s shuttle worth?
God is in the donations, not the details
An ordinary man who had done extraordinary things
Heinz Meanz Has-Beenz
I can’t bare the Naked Chef
Bogie and Bacall look off-colour
It’s a god’s life
The long reach of television
My kind of serial killer
Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson
On stage with Jerry Springer
Big Brother Iraq
Intimations of mortuaries
Never mind Willy – free Harry
LIFESTYLE
Of mice and morons
Operation Copulation
The foolish will always be with us
In the sharks’ den
Men are from bars
Sometimes a car is only a car
Whose line is it, anyway?
Don’t call me, baby
Sealed with a kiss
Survival of the fittest
No brains please – we’re hippies
Academy of flirting
Nature is not our friend
The sound of one hand clapping
Here’s to the ladies
The penis
Nothing but fear itself
People of the book
Another sniper column
Good fences make good neighbours
Bag to the future
SMS SCKS
Another puzzling New Year
Valentine’s Day
Another day, another dolour
No nudes is good news
Flu is a tense of fly
Home of the free ride
Confessions of a bad son
Somewhere over the rainbow
SPORT
Losers in sport
Rugby World Cup 1999: Being a supporter
Woman beats man
Rugby World Cup 1999: Why we dislike the English
South African sport needs new songs
A celebration of cricket
Sporting sex
Tyson 2000
Clichés, champions and Baby Jake
Superstition in sport
The day after Hansie was accused
Olympics 2000: A lesson from chess
Olympics 2000: Perspective down under
Olympics 2000: God needs an off-season too
Paralympics
Keep in character
Persecution complex
Comrade Porky
Kelehe’s moving victory
A day at Loftus
Anna vs Amanda
A premier bore
Players without passion are like Danie-less dreams
The death of Hansie
A new sports hero
Rugby’s day of shame
With supporters like these, who needs opposition?
How short can 100 metres get?
Martina Navratilova
World Cup opening ceremony
Cricket World Cup 2003: A toast to the minnows
Cricket World Cup 2003: Saluting the winners
Henry Olonga and courage
Potchefstroom Olympic bid
There is no place like home
Bring me the head of Stuart Dickinson
Andre Agassi – the womble of Wimbledon
A moment of rugby relief
Graeme, Lord Smith
Preface
I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED to write the preface to a book of collected columns. My columns, preferably. When I was younger, long before I started writing for a living, I could imagine no exercise of writing more glamorous. I would read Clive James’ prefaces to his volumes of television columns and feel a pang of envy far sharper even than any I experienced while reading the columns themselves.
Clive James brought to his columns a weight and seriousness that anchored them not merely to the page – an extraordinary achievement in itself – but to a deeper and wider and solemnly impressive tradition of writing. Weight and seriousness are always attractive to a young man with aspirations, but sometimes in James’ columns I found I could do without them. Too often they seemed to come too obdurately in the way of the words. Whatever else a column should be, however serious it is, I have always held it should be light – not necessarily light in the sense of having skimpy or non-exist
ent subject matter, although those are some of my favourite columns, but in the sense of being light on its feet, or the way the sun catches the water and dances in those hours when it is not too overbearingly overhead. “I would not believe in a god who does not know how to dance,” wrote Nietzsche, and I think the same is true of columns. (That was a favourite trick of James’ – quoting dead German philosophers. Often in the original.)
Clive James is one of the funniest and most luminously gifted columnists in print, but every so often I would find myself wishing his words were more like pebbles worn smooth by the sea, less like perfectly formed miniatures chiselled of the seamless rock quarried from Mount Parnassus. Ah, but a preface is not a column, so when he took the opportunity, in each of his three collections, to wax serious and weighty about his own writing, I lapped it up. What could be more satisfying, I wondered, than to be called upon to dedicate a few thousand thoughtful words to your own words? The columns themselves are just stepping stones to that dizzy moment of carefully modest self-indulgence. A preface! The preface! Your preface! Oh, let the trumpets sound.
Which may be why I find it easy to write the columns, and almost impossible to write this preface. I have learnt, over the past six years, that I do not do serious and weighty very well. The only columns I have ever scrapped and re-written are those of which I went to sleep thinking: “Now that was a fine piece of writing. Now that will show the world that I am a serious writer.” Thinking, as Ed Wood famously thought about Plan 9 From Outer Space, “That’s the one they’ll remember me for.”
On each occasion I have arisen the next morning, re-read the polished masterpiece and expunged it on the spot, blushing furiously. When I try to write with weight and seriousness, I invariably produce the kind of turgid, belly-stroking mush that deserves to be roughed up by the cool kids and stuffed into a gym locker after school. There is nothing weighty I can say that I cannot more effectively say lightly.
So alas, having waited six years for the chance to loom serious in this preface, I shall have to let the moment slip. I know nothing useful about writing, anyway. Writing for me is a breathless mixture of desperation, blind fear, animal instinct and the dumb luck to stumble across the right word every so often, the way a hungry child lost at night in a dark forest might accidentally stumble across a piece of gingerbread that doesn’t have a witch attached. The columns which I look back on now with the greatest degree of approval are those I wrote in my regular panic of self-doubt, which I submitted in defeat, fully expecting a curt reply from the editor saying, “Well, we gave it a try. Perhaps there is some other field of endeavour to which you might find yourself better suited. Professional kick-boxing, say. Or singing.” I still expect that reply. I am expecting it now.
Since my first-ever television column in August 1997 (the first column collected in this book), and not counting feature articles, reviews, books, travel writing and occasional work for television and radio, I have written on average more than 100 000 words in columns every year. It was difficult to turn down new columns, because I could never find in myself the confidence that the columns I already had would not next week be cancelled due to lack of interest. The drawbacks to that turn of mind are over-work and a constant throbbing, free-floating anxiety; the benefits remain the desire to make each column count, to be able to think, Well, they won’t fire me for this one. “We that live to please,” wrote Samuel Johnson, “must please to live”, and I know what he meant.
One lesson I have learnt is that in order to keep writing well, you must believe not only in what you write, but where you are writing. Only once has that belief failed me: I found myself contributing regularly to a publication I had come to actively dislike, in which I had – vain beast! – grown embarrassed to appear. As my respect for the page upon which I wrote diminished, my respect dwindled for the writing itself. When that happens, you are better off becoming a professional kick-boxer, or auditioning for Idols 3.
It was difficult making a selection from nearly a thousand columns. I solved the problem by not making any decisions at all, and handing over three lever-arch files of clippings to my editors and publishers at Zebra Press. Being an editor and a publisher in South Africa is thankless and shamefully under-rewarded, but it is heroic work. I am very fortunate to have found the editors and publishers with whom I work. If there are any obvious omissions here, it is not their fault. It is probably because I forgot to make a clipping that week.
I am sometimes asked whether I enjoy watching as much television as I do for my Sunday Independent column, or whether I am really as enthusiastic about sport as I pretend in Business Day. Would I not rather, people ask, be writing about more serious matters? Matters of weight, say, and seriousness? To which I reply: no. Or rather, I don’t understand the question. Television and sport are two of my most deep-seated and abiding pleasures, nay, joys. They have given me comfort and solace – and the sorrow, fury, heartache and delight so necessary for any healthy relationship – longer than any human being besides my mother, and I rather fancy they will still be around when I am an old man solitary upon my sofa.
Besides, if you cannot find weight and seriousness in television and sport, where do you hope to find it? All the world is in there, all the dreams, folly, futility and splendour of which we are made, and I hope I have, in some varying degrees, made clear in the course of these columns why I think so. A cricket series, say, is – like a Shakespearean tragedy – more a mirror than a window. We look into it to see elements of ourselves writ large or small or refracted through a prism. If we bring nothing to it, we can hardly hope to carry anything away. I take great joy from these things, and writing about them is a fiery distillation of that joy. At all times except the last few hours before deadline, I can hardly believe my luck.
The same is true of the other ephemera of modern life. The annoyances and regrets and secret yearnings that animate the lifestyle columns – the problems of sex and dating and drugs and neighbours and babies and male bonding and flying economy class and whatever else it is that attracts the attention long enough to be written – these are the thousand tiny brushstrokes that combine to make the picture of being youngish and single and me in the modern world. If the picture is less likely to be found hanging on the walls of the Hermitage or the Louvre than it is to be prestiked to the wall of a kindergarten classroom with the crayon lines slightly smudged, the fault lies more with the footling obsessions of the painter than with the wider world he lives in.
Finally, I am asked with some frequency about the Chalk ‘n Cue. Does it exist? Is there a Porky Withers? What is Hairy Mike’s dark secret? Who is Sad Henry? The answer is yes, these people exist, and one day, more formally, their stories will be told. Yes, there is a Chalk ’n Cue. And if you have bought a copy of this book, you are just the sort of person who would be welcome there. So this is my invitation to you: come around any time. Show Karl the barman a copy of this book, and tell him I sent you. The first drink’s on the house.
DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY
JOHANNESBURG
AUGUST 2003
1
Television
Miss South Africa
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 10 AUGUST 1997
IT HAS BEEN a long time since SABC TV has been able to turn the heads of the viewing public, so the staff and presenters were justifiably excited about the fact that the 1997 Miss South Africa pageant was once again “on public television, where it belongs”.
Precisely where it belongs is a moot point, although the trash can of history might be a good place to start looking. On the evidence of last Saturday night’s pageant, the programmers for M-Net must be congratulating themselves on a job well done.
Showing a laudable instinct for economy, the SABC decided to scale down the extravaganza side of things this year. This was just a plain old vaganza, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The trick, though, is knowing exactly where to cut corners. On the plus side, no American so-called television stars presented the show; on t
he downside, three local so-called personalities did.
I could have forgiven much about the vaganza – the unsynchronised dancing, the insistent pink and red colour scheme, the sets that seemed to tremble and sway with each high-heeled step and twirl – if I hadn’t had to listen to the light and witty banter between Ursula Stapelfeldt, Tsepo Mabona and someone introduced as “the multi-talented Simon Jones”.
To be fair, the embarrassment factor is a staple at events of this type worldwide. Watch any show from the Oscars to the Artes, and prepare to cringe. Scriptwriters who can put together perfectly good stage directions can’t write dialogue worth a tinker’s cuss. It almost seems to be a condition of employment. Come now – did I really hear Ursula tell us that with their makeovers and new hairdos the contestants had been transformed into “orbs of magic”?
At least she didn’t have Tsepo’s job of complimenting each contestant as they appeared in their slinky silver swimwear. “She’s a real rainbow child!” announced Tsepo about Swimwear #1.
“Have a great one, Yolanda,” he urged Swimwear #2.
“Keep on smiling!” he begged Swimwear #3. I could barely keep my eyes on the shimmering orbs of magic.
Besides not buying decent dialogue, the producers also bungled by cutting back on the lighting budget. Perhaps as a sop to Islamic fundamentalists, or in an attempt to defuse the radical feminist critique, the lighting technicians swathed the contestants in a shadowy cloak from the calves up. I fiddled with the brightness button, I shone a torch at the screen, I took pills to dilate my pupils – nothing worked.
Alas, nothing could conceal the horror of the evening gowns. “Look out!” I screamed when the first contestants appeared swaddled in one of Derek of Di Patri’s nightmarish visions. “There are triffids growing out of your chest!” And there were! From their upper parts burst a bloom, a bower, an effulgence of foliage. Each poor girl cowered behind a corsage from the Black Lagoon, a corsage fed upon amphetamines and steroids and nuclear waste, monsters of chlorophyll that looked set to turn upon their hosts. It was a like a vegetarian version of Alien.