Thursday, September 28, 2006
Spitting Image

Dinner last night with a very old (old in years we've known each other, not in any other sense) friend, Roger Law, who co-founded (with Peter Fluck) Spitting Image, a satirical TV series featuring puppets made by the team. The final series was aired over ten years ago but it still remains in people's consciousness - evidenced not least by the length and depth of the Wikipedia entry I linked to above and which is constantly updated and amended. If you have the capacity to view video links I do recommend that you follow the links to the songs. Some of them are offensive (I don't think my South African colleagues will thank me for reminding them of the Apartheid-era South Africa song), all of them are politically incorrect and all brilliantly performed.

Later today I'm seeing another old (this time even younger) friend, Charlotte Mendelson, to discuss her new book due out on 4 May next year, 'When we were bad'. She works for a competitor publisher (boo) as an editor at Headline Review but she still finds time to write the most brilliant fiction. Her first two novels are already in Picador in paperback and there was some debate about whether she was too young to write such important books. Bah phooey I say and if you go this link and scroll down you can hear her (and Joanna Trollope) being interviewed on that subject.

#    |  Comments [1]  | 
10/5/2006 3:32:29 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
A week later, and no one has commented? I cannot let this pass. As a South African, I could not possibly have been unaware of that" South African song". Almost every Englishman I saw when I visited the UK asked me if I had heard it. And someone at Macmillan even went to the trouble of buying me a copy of the single. I still have it. I also have a turntable!

I thought they were rude. But I did think the song was funny, even though you English always get the accent wrong.

I had never seen the video, but managed to link to it from the blog. It's funny, but the puppets do not really look South African. I think they look English. They remind me of those chappies who came out here to splodge a bit of wonga and hire a couple of guns so that they could bring democracy to that funny little oil-rich island off the west coast of Africa and and earn a little bit on the side for themselves as well. Until they very unsportingly got rumbled by that nasty Mr Mugabe's police. But the chinless rally driver got away by doing a plea bargain so that he could concentrate on his divorce. At least we won't see him out here drinking our Chardonnay while his bodyguards pick their noses and compare earrings.

Without running the video again, I cannot remember if any of the South Africans were black. Maybe black does not count? If they do, surely Mr Mandela is nice. Or is he not a South African?

I must really sound very po-faced and solemn. But really, South Africa was never really like that. Except maybe to the little group of expatriates and journalists who revel in ridicule. It's actually very exciting and gets better by the day; I have just cast my eye over a wonderful tender for books to go to schools in the Eastern Cape. More is being done for education than ever before.

Besides a turntable, I still have a VHS machine. Remember them? If anybody wants to get rid of their SPITTING IMAGE videos, please get in touch with me. I'd really like to see them.
Cory Voigt