"But I Digress ..." Read Free

tourism. Focus Features (SABC3, Monday, 10pm) was devoted to the visit of Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean playwright and poet. I had known Dorfman only through his ponderous and somewhat turgid play, Death and the Maiden . After Monday night, I now also know him through his ponderous and extremely turgid poetry.
    The documentary opened with the bizarre sight of Dorfman creeping through the veld after a giraffe, singing what appeared to be an atonal Chilean drinking song. Soon he left the giraffe behind and turned his attention to the city. Even sooner, I started missing the giraffe. Dorfman, we discovered, was in South Africa largely to lurk around the truth commission hearings and to share his feelings on the matter with the people of South Africa. He wasn’t shy to do so.
    I am always reluctant to blame individuals for the impression they convey in carefully edited documentaries, but if Dorfman isn’t a pompous, self-important bore in real life, then the makers of Focus Features were extremely cunning in making him appear so. It’s bad enough that we were forced to welcome into our homes verse that included lines like: “If you could take one word with you to the future/What is it to be?” But, under the banner of intellectual cross-pollination, we were further treated to the sight of Dorfman in a humorously pink shirt, wandering from place to place explaining to locals exactly what was going on in their country. I found myself in the weird position of wishing he would read more poetry.
    The lowest point of the show was Dorfman in the District Six museum, explaining to us – us! – at great length what District Six was and why it was bulldozed. I could perhaps have overcome my irritation if the man had shown any signs of clear historical thinking, rather than lapsing into statements like: “The tragedy of District Six was that 20 years later, there was a place called Sarajevo, and something very similar happened.”
    Sarajevo and District Six? Similar? I have heard Martin Locke make more sense than that. Not satisfied, Dorfman popped up again on Robben Island, pronouncing that: “Robben Island is a distillation, a concentration, an essence of what South Africa was.”
    Oh really, Ariel? What makes you say that? The penguins? The lime quarries? The communal backgammon board? Gah.
    But such quibbles were beside the point. The poet was speaking (in an American accent) and we were expected to listen. I don’t mean to sound parochial here, but if we really needed some ill-informed, self-impressed versifier to talk a bushel of patronising nonsense to the camera in exchange for a free holiday, we didn’t need to bring one all the way from Chile. Surely we have enough muttonheads of our own.
    â€¢ Hot Medium’s Chilean Poet Award for the worst piece of television goes to the new advert for Always sanitary pads. It features a personal testimony from a satisfied customer, concluding with the words: “I tried it, I like it, now I’m sticking to it.” Which surely begs the question: Then aren’t you wearing it the wrong way round?

Mother Teresa should have been blonde
    SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 14 SEPTEMBER 1997
    G OD BLESS MARTIN LOCKE . I can always rely on him to restore my perspective and preserve my sanity.
    In this past week leading to the announcement of the Olympic bid result, I must confess I temporarily lost my head. Won over perhaps by the patriotic charm of a thousand Pick ’n Pay and Nedbank adverts, I allowed my previously unshakeable indifference to the fate of the games to be, well, shaken. Like a mugging victim who has fallen into the Randburg Waterfront and imagines he is being swept down-river toward the sea, I allowed myself to be caught up in the momentum and rainbow-coloured razzmatazz of the big day.
    So it was that I settled down to watch the big occasion with growing nervous anticipation. I had all the usual Big Match symptoms: racing heart, dry