"But I Digress ..."
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Authors: Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Tags: #“But I Digress …”: A selection of his best columns
“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
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
Glued to our sets for Diana's match and dispatch
Mother Teresa should have been blonde
Noot vir Noot
â game show of the Galapagos
That's no duck, that's Ally McVeal
Down the hatch with Keith Floyd
Darker side of Christmas lurks in every living room
I am Wat Siam â TV in Thailand
White male TV columnists overthrow the world
Missouri's living dead elect one of their own
Forget phobias, find a fix for Felicia
Not even St Helena offers safe haven
It takes a lot of money to look this cheap
God is in the donations, not the details
An ordinary man who had done extraordinary things
Bogie and Bacall look off-colour
Never mind Willy â free Harry
The foolish will always be with us
No brains please â we're hippies
The sound of one hand clapping
Good fences make good neighbours
Rugby World Cup 1999: Being a supporter
Rugby World Cup 1999: Why we dislike the English
South African sport needs new songs
Clichés, champions and Baby Jake
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
Players without passion are like Danie-less dreams
With supporters like these, who needs opposition?
Cricket World Cup 2003: A toast to the minnows
Cricket World Cup 2003: Saluting the winners
Bring me the head of Stuart Dickinson
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 â an extraordinary achievement in itself â 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 â not necessarily light in the sense of having skimpy or non-existent 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' â 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 â vain beast! â 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 â and the sorrow, fury, heartache and delight so necessary for any healthy relationship â 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 â like a Shakespearean tragedy â 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 â 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 â 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 ân 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