Bottoms Up, Tom
So. For the New Year, some years ago, I resolved again to go back to gym. I saw Evan (über-physio) for the first time about this time – late January. After exchanging good wishes he asked me if I made any resolutions, and I said, yes, I am going back to gym this year. He looked slightly amused. So go then, he said, it’s almost February. And I think I went.
Going back to gym never featured again in my annual list of good intentions. I now just try to carry on going, regardless of the size of the gap between visits. One day, one week, one month: in a sense the gym resolution is the opposite of the quit-smoking one. Mercia Axon told us (Smokenders) that people who say that they had, in the past, stopped smoking for a week, a month or a year, only to start again, did not really stop. They only took a break. I now try to apply that principle to the gym thing. I don’t have to go back; I can just carry on going. It works in a weird way.
I make a list every year even though, strictly speaking, I have only ever managed to stick to one resolution – the one to recycle. In a fragment of a 702 discussion I heard in the car early in Jan some expert told Redi Hlabi that resolutions are more likely to be kept if they are linked to a personal value, or if they are seen as long-term goals, rather than do-or-die ultimatums. This explains the recycling thing. This, and the fact that I installed a simple and manageable system, based on Nicola and Ofer’s, in my kitchen.
Every now and then I separate plastic and cans – the wine bottles have their own special place – and drive to the Melrose dump where I can feel even more virtuous if I tip the guy that helps me offload R10. Of course, when the visits to the dump are too infrequent, the wine bottles become a rather embarrassing mountain in the shopping trolley I use to haul them past the neighbouring flats, down in the lift, through the foyer and into the garage. Sometimes I manage to hide them under the plastic, but I am always convinced that Esther and Joe from next door are watching through the peep hole and judging me.
Anyway. My resolutions this year include un-cluttering my life and my flat, cooking new things, learning new things, seeing friends more, making my world bigger (not sure yet how, but working on a couple of things) and to blog more often.
What I should have resolved instead is to no longer see any Tom Cruise movies. I once decided not to see any more Charlie Sheen films, and I have stopped paying for anything starring Sarah Jessica Parker last year, but I am not sure if those efforts were, strictly, on the resolutions list. I considered that their agents may just have chosen crap scripts for them, but SJP shares the CAA stable with Cate Blanchett and George Clooney, who have both managed impeccable filmographies. On the other hand, she also shares it with Tom Cruise, whose Jack Reacher was a colourless and incredible affair, flailing in spite of its excellent bad guys – Jai Courtney and Werner Hertzog – and Robert Duvall. The main characters, Reacher and Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), lawyer, love interest and rebellious daughter of District Attorney Alex Rodin (Richard Jenkins), are a poorly defined, dull pair with absolutely no raison d’être. We have no idea who Reacher is – a fuzzy history expediently revealed in the dialogue only makes him more impenetrable – or why Helen decides to defy her father. If there has ever been a good lesson in how not write a back story, Jack Reacher would be it.
The film was so bad that the entire franchise it was supposed to launch has apparently been canned. One might suggest that director Christopher McQuarrie sticks to writing screenplays (The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie and The Tourist) where he seems to know his craft. Anyway, I resolve to forego Tom Cruise movies in future. Excluding, maybe Mission: Impossible 5, in spite of the fact that McQuarrie may direct, again. They do seem to be getting better and better. (Does this mean I am already resolving to break my resolution?) Maybe I’ll wait to hear what Barry says. I think 2013 is going to be a very good year.
Filed under: movies | Leave a Comment
Tags: entertainment, Jack Reacher, New Year's resolutions, Sarah Jessica Parker, Tom Cruise
Not quite
It is that time of the year all right, and in spite of it being Monday, I am glad that it is. Only because I finished and dispatched my 3000 words to PP, and I only have one more programme to mix (code for “my work is just about done”) – tomorrow. So, it’s like being not quite on holiday, which helps one cope with the end-of-year madness that would otherwise frustrate one if one still had serious work to do.
Like, for example, the fact that everybody and their aunt is forever out-of-friggen-office having a celebratory booze-up somewhere. Our little open-plan broom cupboard felt a like a tomb this morning – one where the corpse had come back to life and is off somewhere sucking the blood out of people with deadline stress. Not like me. Monday has never been so rosy.
In anticipation of this halcyon dream and because I have not seen them for ages, I had lunch with the girls at Ciro’s yesterday. I have not really been there much since my last birthday supper, perhaps three years ago, when the duck was dry, and Ciro unapologetically put it on the bill. Before that I went there regularly. Not anymore.
And yesterday I remembered why not. Look, it’s hard to find a better place to have good food under cool trees made cooler by that fine-mist cool-down spray contraption in the summer. The tables are prettily laid with cloth tablecloths and real serviettes. And mostly, Ciro’s food is still very good. Jacques says that Ciro makes the best risotto in Johannesburg after mine. (OK maybe he did not say that, but this is almost certainly the case.) But I do not think that the food in a restaurant that charges R110 for a starter that does not – at the very least – contain truffles and foie gras or Alaskan king crab, should be “mostly very good”. It should be consistently excellent, and Chiro’s is not.
I had the chicken, stuffed with couscous, crumbed with polenta and served with a delicious cream sauce of some kind (but not too much). The chicken had a great range of textures (the polenta really crisps on the outside) and was sufficiently full of flavour. I chose the chicken, perversely, because I knew the cost-to-labour ratio was low. I know how long it takes to make little roulades out of chicken breast, to crumb them, and deep fry them.
By comparison, slapping a curry-like sauce on top of a piece of salmon is a one-hand-behind-your-back job. And I did not like the salmon. I thought it was a waste of a good piece of fish, and other than the curry splat on the top, did not really taste like R175,00. Ruth shared a bit with me, and she said she liked it. Jules, lactose intolerant, had pizza with prawns and capers. That was also excellent, not a crumb remained.
And then it was time for pudding. I ordered the tarte tatin and Jules the crème brulee. Ruth likes to share when it comes to dessert. The crème brulee had separated: none of that silken, dense, melt-in-your-mouth vanilla custard stuff. I took us quite a long time to get someone to take it away, and by then the bit where we dipped our spoon was looking quite watery, as if you added some scrambled egg to dishwater. The tarte tatin was a pleasant apple-tart kind of a thing, but not quite a tarte tatin, which, as we all know, has golden, deeply caramelised apples, rich and moist, on top of a crisp pastry. To see what a beautiful mini tarte tatin should look like, go here. Or even here. What a beautiful tarte tatin looks like is no mystery.
Ciro’s version is more like a small stack of sweet, pale, slightly dry slices of unpeeled apple on op top of a crisp pastry. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the pastry. It was served with some custard, and it was, as I said, a pleasant apple-dish-thing.
I felt vindicated, a little, that we took our own bottle of bubbly. (Has anybody noticed that when you take your own MCC to a restaurant that they always give you the most amazingly cheap glasses?)
I know Ciro’s is very popular in spite of the dazzling price tag, but I suspect, nay, FEAR, that the bulk of Johannesburgers may not always have palates equal to those of our snotty compatriots of the mountain. There really is no other explanation.
Anyway. I am off to PE on Thursday, where I will practice mini tarte tatins in my mother’s kitchen and put pictures on the blog.
Aluta Continua.
According to the Daily Maverick this morning, most people spend 12 minutes every Monday complaining. Just saying.
Filed under: Food | Leave a Comment
Tags: cooking, eating, Food, restaurants
Against the odds, shit happens
I don’t know what is wrong with me, or thousands of other Lions supporters. We remain loyal and hopeful against all odds. If you subscribe to Einstein’s postulation that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, we are all mad. Not as mad, however, as the (even more) thousands of Stormers fans would be bawling into their Ohlssons’ tonight if SAB had not discontinued the brand a long time ago. I always think of Western Provincers as Ohlssons drinkers – you now that joke of the similarity between Ohlssons and making love in a canoe? Etc.
Even though I cannot find it in myself to support the Stormers (almost) ever*, I made an exception this weekend, being a patriot. It’s the Lion in me – or at least I hope that’s it. Whatever. I was going with the odds of us (SA) winning the Super Rugby. Historically (apparently, according to darling) no team has ever travelled away for a final and won, with the exception of the time the Bulls nudged in a victory over the Sharks in the shark tank in 2007. But let’s face it; they did not travel much further than they would reasonably do for a family holiday by the sea, so perhaps that does not count.
So the Sharks, having kicked ass down under against the Reds the week before while the Stormers did their roots and went for massages, were unlikely victors on Newlands on Saturday. The Sharks (or “Sarks” according to Ashwell Willemse in the Supersport studio) put the first points on the board and the Stormers never managed to catch up, not even in the second half when they appeared to have finally tied the laces to their boots. We might have to rename them the Centipedes.
In spite of myself, I was a little in shock. Ashwell calls the upcoming final in NZ the “Sarks’ Mission Impossible” and although we hope it turns out for them like it always turns out for Tom Cruise, we hope against the odds. Because as we know, Super Rugby is not Hollywood, where shit happening is de rigueur, but the odds are that things will turn out OK.
It occurred to me, at the end of the game, that my relationship with darling was a little like a combination of Super Rugby and Hollywood. Considering my track record, the odds were also in favour of shit happening, but like the S15, things did not turn out OK when it did. So the final whistle also blew for us. (That’s not him in the picture, and I only wish a tiny little bit it was, really.) It was a hard game, and in the end, rugby was the winner. Or love, or something. More of a Viggo Mortensen movie than a Tom Cruise one, I guess.
Good luck to the Sarks. Rugby club will convene, no doubt, to cheer them on in Melville, and we will love them either way when they get back. Just like we do the Lions. Perhaps they will shine in the Curry Cup. We hope against the odds.
* I want to put it on record that although I am not a Stormers fan, this does not mean that I don’t give credit where it is due. I think Peter Grant’s time as the Springbok flyhalf is long overdue, and that Jean de Villiers did a great job against the English in the last test series. And I did feel very sorry for Bryan when he cried like a baby on Saturday.
Filed under: Stuff | 1 Comment
First of all, I want to say, “Go Brett Murray, go! Excellent work.” Just so that my delight in the Hail to the Thief II exhibition cannot be perceived as ambiguous in any way. I loved it. I found it reassuring, witty, acute; it expresses absolutely everything I feel about the current ANC government (with the exception perhaps of Aaron Motsoaledi, who I think is soldering on, trying to do the right thing under trying circumstances).
It also momentarily removed me from the precipice of anger and despair. I don’t have anything to add to the debate as such, seething and rampant as it is already, other than to say that I think Mike van Graan’s review of the work itself, Pierre de Vos’ assessment of a possible legal wrangle and J Brooks Spector’s analysis of the furore are the soundest formal contributions to it.
The thing that got me going this morning, actually – and also in the wake of the “tiresome race card” that came with the president’s-spear pandemonium, if I must admit – was the EWN headline “ANC shocked by arrogant Zille”. The thing about the ruling party is that it is so easily shocked by things that are not really shocking. Not so long ago they were shocked by judge Leon Halgryn’s finding that “the publication and chanting of the words ‘dubula ibhunu’, prima facie satisfies the crime of incitement to murder”, and, on top of it, refused the ANC leave to appeal. This left them “perturbed and shocked”. Helen’s claim – that Thuli Madonsela’s prematurely, and apparently mischievously, released draft report on the Western Cape government’s communications tender process may be legally flawed – is not shocking. It’s just politics. The report suggests that the WCG’s contract with advertising agency TWBA is invalid. Even Thuli said that Helen’s response is reasonable: if the WCG is not happy with the report, it can challenge it in court. The story is ongoing, and I cannot figure out why the presence of a special advisor on the bid evaluation committee is improper, especially seeing that he apparently failed to influence the outcome of the award. Even if it was an ANC advisor and even if it was an ANC tender – if there is no evidence of someone being personally and illegally enriched by the outcome of a process that, according Section 217(1) of the Constitution, should be fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective, then, who cares? Is Helen a director in the company that lost the tender? Is Ryan Coetzee? I am not committed to this point view, but for now, I am sticking to it.
What is shocking, on the other hand, is Zuma’s reinstatement of crime intelligence boss Richard Mdluli in spite of strong evidence of nepotism, influencing witnesses and looting the secret services account, and his suspected involvement in murder. And what is shocking (to get back to the Spear) is that he slept with – allegedly raped – his HIV-positive niece and that he fathered a love child with the daughter of a friend. I think he can have as many wives as he pleases, but I find it shocking that the taxpayer is footing the bill for every single one of them. Both politically and personally, the president’s track record is basically a list of shocking outrages and obscenities. The painting is not just about philandering and womanising; it is about a leadership style that celebrates the increasing gap between rich and poor; the ongoing inability of the state to provide the kind of education that could, eventually close that gap, and enrichment of his immediate family at the expense of hundreds of devastated miners.
That is shocking… really.
Filed under: In the News | Leave a Comment
Tags: ANC, art, Helen Zille, Jacob Zuma
May the fourth be with you
I had a groovy birthday. Ruth made kick-ass oxtail for lunch, by way of celebration the next day, and I baked a cake. Many wished me happy birthday on FB. I was against FB for a very long time, suspicious and dismissive, reading all the conspiracy theories and other alarmist propaganda journalism literature. But I succumbed, and am happy that I did. FB reminds you about people’s birthdays – sometimes, and then I can wish them happy birthday in return. This is good. Sometimes you get a request for birthday info from a friend and the request turns out to be some app that demands all your information – email, phone, sexual-, medical- and institutional history, ID number, literacy level and whether or not you can make mayonnaise without a recipe, so I often just cancel the whole process half-way. It smacks of the rampant invasion of privacy that early sceptics warned about. I no longer wish to be reminded of that. Besides, now when I post, the link goes onto my FB page and then, sometimes, more than ten people read the blog.
But back to my birthday. I share the 4th of May with an unsurprisingly long list of people, but not many famous ones, which makes one wonder how Wikipedia decided who to include. Although, I guess if you were a Greek football fan in the 1970s, you might have known who Antonis Minou was. Robbie probably knows who he was, but I don’t think that makes him famous. (No, Robbie IS famous.) Their general anonymity, on the other hand, is surprising because a large number of these people were actors and musicians. I was pleased to see that I shared a birthday with Audrey Hepburn and Pia Zadora. Better than Hitler, Wouter Basson or Britney Spears, I say. At the turn of the previous millennium there were a couple of heads of state, and in this millennium, one scientist, one mathematician, one trans-gender surgeon-pioneer, one bishop and Hosni Mubarak. But mostly the list consists of artists, writers, sportsmen (no sportswomen, actually) and a couple of politicians. I am no exception to this rule. Like most of the people on it, I am also not famous. Which I think is OK. Famous people really have to watch the shit they write – just ask Helen Zille.
I am not going to muse more about turning older, except to say that I find it gets harder as you go along, mostly because of constant improvements in medical science and face creams. Combined with the current fashionable tendency to live healthier lives, innovation in these fields means that we are never ever going to be able to afford to retire: by the time we die the annuity would have been kaput for two decades or more. That stuff is expensive, as I am sure you know. Anyway. I had a good day. Thanks for the good wishes, and may we all turn a wonderful age this year.
Filed under: Bête Noire, Stuff | Leave a Comment
Tags: ageing, FB, Food, friends, Helen Zille
Back in the saddle
Well, I have no excuses left, of course, the research report is done, and I am now officially the recipient of a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Wits University. Or will be, once I pay the R90 copyright fee that the fees office claims I owe Wits for my report. I argue that I have already paid the R90, and surely they do not charge you R90 for every year that you are registered. Etc. Considering the thousands of rand that this particular upskilling has cost me, many may suggest that I should just pay and graduate already. But enough is enough. Anyway. There is no other writing, no other guilt, nothing whatsoever that keeps me from resuming the blog.
And what better inspiration than the discovery of a lovely word that serves both to educate and to entertain? A priapism is a persistent, long-lasting erection. Although I know of some imagine there are many… people… who would find this a desirable er, state, not so poor Henry Wolf from San Francisco who has suffered from such a priapism since 1 May 2010. Henry believes it was brought on by two back-to-back two-hour rides on his 1993 BMW motorcycle and the poorly designed ridge on the seat. (Seriously Henry? It didn’t even hurt?) He is very distressed and is suing BMW. He cannot have sex, which has brought him much anguish, understandably. He is also suing for lost wages and so on. This story appeared in the Huffington Post today, exactly two years after the tragic event occurred. I wondered briefly if it had really been an April fool’s story that was spiked at the time and saved for later use – you know, stuff that would never float it past the public prosecutor here is often taken quite seriously in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But no, it seems quite serious. The obvious question is, of course, why did it take Henry so long to lay a charge? There are two possibilities. Either their court backlog is at least as dire as ours, or the (possible) initial charm of the er, situation started to wear a bit thin. Nonetheless, I am sure his mother told him that motorbikes were dangerous, and he just didn’t listen.
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Towards the end…
Towards the end, during the closing statements, I thought that it had been remiss of me not to count how many times Cyril Ramaphosa had said that we should not be afraid; that we should not fear. Should the constitution then later be ravaged by the ANC, I could refer back to this post and write a new one about how Comrade Breakthrough was sent to the launch of One Law, One Nation: The Making of the South African Constitution at the Constitutional Court last week to make reassuring noises while his comrades looted the Bill of Rights. It was a negative moment, true, in an evening that was otherwise quite pleasant.
I like Cyril. Sometimes I think that he may be a good president… one day. But there is something indecipherable about him and even as one is drawn to his easy and reasonable charm, he remains inaccessible, and it is impossible to know if the words from his mouth are just words. I only met him once. A few years ago I interviewed him for a Nelson Mandela obit doccie (that happily remains in the SABC archives for now) and he said a very strange thing to me while the crew was setting up and I was making preliminary conversation: something to the effect of “from under which rock have you crawled?” It was a disconcerting moment, and I cannot remember how I responded but although the words were nasty, there was nothing in his demeanour but curiosity and humour. I think this describes it.
Anyway. I realise that, as the chairman of the Constitutional Assembly he was not sent to the event by the ANC. He is, after all, on the cover of the book. The photograph captures the striking moment in which he, standing next to Madiba at the signing of the constitution on 10 December 1996, holds the bound document aloft. They are both smiling; his eyes are crinkling. The only words on the first page are also his.
I lifted the constitution into the air in the heat of the moment. I hadn’t planned it. I had to do it to show the people that this is it. This is the document that they had struggled for, died for and wept for. This document binds us all together to a common destiny, a common future and a joint aspiration of what this country should be.
Amen. Or, actually, ahem. Only time will tell, but contrary to Cyril’s crooning reassurance, I think some fear may be called for.
Filed under: In the News, WFT?! | 2 Comments
Tags: ANC, constitution
Poor show
I think when you watch a romcom and at the end, when the main guy and his true love find each other, you are sorry, then the movie is not a success.
I also think that Patrick Dempsey will never make the same seamless transition from heartbreak hospital doctor to Hollywood A-list leading man that George Clooney did. I suspect he has the wrong hair.
Made of Honour – eTV’s chick flick offering this evening – is a terrible film, so bad that I cannot spend a lot of time on it not even to slag it off. Director Paul Weiland honed his skills in TV comedy; according to the IMDb copious episodes of Mr Bean were what prepared him for this dull romance, and it shows.
Weiland nearly overcame his unfortunate professional beginnings when he directed Rosanna’s Grave, which was charming and well constructed and weighed down only by the bewildering variety of non-Italian Latin actors faking Italian accents. Ok. I exaggerate. Only both the leads were non-Italian Latins. Whatever.
But MoH clunks along, cringe by cringe, to a predictably unlikely happy ending. I fantasised that Tom (Patrick) would just keep on going back to NYC, instead of grabbing a horse and racing along the shores of a Scottish loch to say those three little words to the woman about to marry Kevin McKidd (also a Grey’s Anatomy vet) in order to win her heart after being inspired by a sheep dog to do so. But of course he did not, and the film would be poorer for it if it was possible to be poorer than utterly destitute. In the city of cinema, Made of Honour can’t afford a trailer in the park, and grabs some shuteye on a bench in the early morning hours when its aching extremities and hunger pangs are eventually numbed by sheer exhaustion. Really.
“No!” I silently willed Hanna (Michelle Monaghan), taking another sip of Hartenberg chard. “Marry Colin (Kevin) instead!” (In my book he was all the yummier for being an actual Scot.) Of course she didn’t, and I suspect that when she eventually said “I do” to McDreamy on a New York city rooftop, she was sorry.
Or not. Either way, it would have been easier, probably, to suspend disbelief in the tooth fairy. If one had to choose.
Filed under: movies, TV | Leave a Comment
Tags: directors, love, Patrrick Dempsey, Paul Weiland, TV
Reality Bites
Ok. I am watching the Saturday night movie on a screen that lacks snow, floating lines and ghost vision – you know when you have double vision while watching TV and you have only been drinking tea all night. That kind of vision. Yes, I know, the period in which this is believable is the nineteen eighties. Still, I know for a fact that since then I spent at last one Saturday night drinking tea. But I am veering off track. I am grateful that I am not driving.
The short version is that since my last blog in (gasp!) early August, Lily sent Elias to slip notes under all the doors in Hampshire House advising occupants that people will come to install the DSTV cables. And so they did. The white cable edged unobtrusively on on top of the skirting, around the corner, behind the TV stand. There the end was lassoed and tied. Ah good, I thought, when I get DSTV in the near or far future, or even five years from now, I don’t have to do the whole dish thing.
But there was more. On a Saturday morning, some few days after the installation, I kissed darling goodbye outside the front door and there were guys busy with the new cables some way down the corridor. We waved good morning. Darling went. Seconds later there was a knock on the door and a very short fellow appeared and asked if I had been “connected”. “You must really struggle to reach things on the top shelf,” I restrained myself from saying and let him in to connect me. I was not afraid. Although he had the lean, edgy and rugged good looks of a young Mel Gibson in a post-mullet universe, he must have stood no higher than 5’2” in his Cats. If the morning was going to turn into bad slasher flick, it was most likely going to be Defence of the 50 Foot Woman.
Anyway, I cleaned the house while he fiddled with the cable, and when he left, I had a perfect picture on my own TV, for the first time since I have owned one.
Ok. So. See? Vaguely entertaining as that might be, it is neither interesting nor replete with universal truths, which is why I am not writing a lot on the blog. I will look our for more interesting things to write about when I am not rolling the research-report roller-coaster of ecstasy and despair.
(The despair is mostly about the fact that I have discovered that for the report to be really good, I may to go back to the public-sphere theoretical framework, and that is very hard on the brain.)
And so on. Perhaps tomorrow morning’s papers will be fun.
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I still use bunny ears – or an equivalent – to tune into the public broadcaster and eTV. I have had brief fantasies about the perfect picture that a satellite dish and an exorbitant monthly subscription (I think R600-ish a month to watch Masterchef Australia once a week and Super Rugby/Tri-nations once a year is more than a little steep) would bring, but not many. If I watch without my glasses I don’t really notice the speckle and the fuzzy edges and anyway my expectations of the channel offerings are not high. Anything worth watching is usually scheduled after my bedtime, although it was my intention to break to the rules tonight to catch the new (sic) CSI New York at ten.
Considering all of the above, I was a little puzzled at my dismay when I switched on SABC3 shortly after eight. At first I thought I was watching a choir competition. The fellows sported brown shwe-shwe dashikis and crooned what I thought was something religious. I am accustomed to the fact that its economic woes meant that the SABC has had to rerun 20-year-old Afrikaans drama series to avoid hours of black screen, but the old TV2 and TV3 Sunday afternoon faire, I thought, was a new low.
But when the performance faded to a melodious halt, the man who dashed onto the stage to do the continuity presenting had a funny accent and soon lapsed into some French, which I thought made the whole affair a little more current. This, and the absolutely great suit he was wearing. While I was trying to Google the night’s TV schedule, a full symphony orchestra erupted in the early, delicate notes of Ravel’s Bolero and some ballerinas teetered into the frame.
Hmm. A variety show? As my computer booted up a male dance group joined the swaying swans. The guys were wearing plain white shirts and black pants and they were doing that very old Michael Jackson Thriller-type dancing, except that they were barely synchronised. And then some girl dancers came on with red costumes that were sort of Indian, and they immediately converged on centre stage to do the goddess Durga-lookalike thing when they crouch at various levels behind each other and stick their hands out and flutter them. Hmm. Cross-cultural, crossed purposes and generally pedestrian. I managed to open Chrome and typed in “what’s on SABC3 tonight”. At which stage everything was explained, if not clarified.
SABC3 was going to “cross live to the IOC opening ceremony in Durban”. JZ was going to speak. The Ravel persisted relentlessly, as it does, increasingly urgent and loud. Sanitised gumboot dancers came on to add to the symbolic cultural diversity. I looked at my watch. They were supposed to cross to Top Billing at 8.30, according to the announcement, and it was already 8.38. I wondered if JZ was still going to speak. But then the music terminated and the continuity announcer was back, this time with a sidekick. More English and French, and then more dancers, this time with flags. I knew what I was looking at, but not sure why. I was not sure why the show took the form it did. The orchestra indicated there was lots of money thrown at it – the size of the cast. But who in this day and age designed a variety show with such a budget? I imagined that even Mbongeni Ngema could do better in an afternoon.
I recognised the flag of South Korea. Well, I knew it was one of the two (Google again). Now there is something we could call an actual legacy of the 2010 WC. More South Africans now know more international flags than ever before.
SABC3 cut to Top Billing. Seeing Ursula Stapelfeldt sparkle in an overdesigned house was almost a relief.
Filed under: Technopeasant, TV | Leave a Comment
Tags: French, Jacob Zuma, TV
