Glued to our sets for Diana’s match and dispatch

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 7 SEPTEMBER 1997

THE LAST THING the world needs right now is more column centimetres about Diana. The international media have this past week worked themselves into a frenzy over her death, like piranha trying to cram in a final mouthful of flesh from one of the 20th century’s great cash cows. Still, this is a television column, and this week television was all about Diana.

As far as I can work out, Diana’s achievement is unique. She is responsible for not one, but two of the West’s great “what-were-you-doing-when?” moments. Strangely, I was watching television on both occasions.

When I was 10, my Standard 3 teacher brought her Sony Trinitron television set to the classroom and we all gathered round to watch the royal wedding. Though a welcome break from long division and the reproductive cycle of the frog, it was a dull affair, made still more so when the visuals froze so Equity could block out Dame Kiri te Kanawa’s singing. The ceremony had little to offer besides a germ of sexual hope in the breast of every little boy with knobbly knees and sticky-outy ears – a flicker of faith that the future might yet provide us with our very own princess. It was all a bit of a fairytale, really, but on that day, Charles was truly our king.

So as entertainment it was a bit of a dud, but we stuck with it to the bitter end. There were two reasons for such tenacity: firstly, a romantic determination to see the whole schpiel consummated with a kiss; secondly, the overwhelming sense of global connectedness.

The kiss, frankly, was a disappointment. It was dutiful and passionless and applied like local anaesthetic, and many a keenly watching 10-year-old might have had the first inkling of the depressing gap between fairytale and real life. But the power of sharing a moment with an audience of millions remains undiluted.

That is one of the uncomfortable seductions of Diana’s death: watching CNN or BBC News on Sunday morning, each of us could join in a worldwide experience that briefly erased our individual and our national specificity. That illusion of connectedness is fleeting and invariably deceitful, but it is one of the truly modern thrills and often guilty pleasures of our age.

When it came to the actual coverage, there wasn’t much to choose between CNN and the BBC. Both were thorough and professional, and both were quick to put together packages of highlights of the princess’s life, which they recycled over and over throughout the day.

As befits responsible media organs, both took care to frown upon the paparazzi for their thoughtlessness and insensitivity. It also took them both more than 24 hours before they thought to mention the names of the driver who was killed and the bodyguard who was injured in the crash. It’s a small thing, I know, but it might have meant something to the friends and families of the two men. It might have added a touch of humanity to all the newsworthiness.

Something else that’s newsworthy is our very own truth commission. Not only does it command regular media coverage, but it also appears to be stimulating a peculiar form of 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.

• 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?