MURDER CITY
Cape Town crime and other stuff on TV this week
DEON Meyer says the new miniseries Cape Town, screening on DStv, is “the best TV series that has ever been made in our country”. Meyer is perhaps not the most impartial judge. It is an adaptation of his novel Dead Before Dying, so he can’t very well say it’s kak. But the good news is that it isn’t! I say this with relief, because sometimes seeing South Africa on screen stirs what the Germans call fremdschämen :a vicarious feeling of embarrassment for someone else.
I was bracing for a very specific type of fremdschämen when I sat down in front of Cape Town. It’s an international production, so I was harbouring a particular anxiety around the issue of South African accents. Heaven knows we have been shortchanged in this regard before. While there are many familiar local faces in the miniseries, the two co-stars — Boris Kodjoe and Trond Espen Seim — are not sons of this soil.
Kodjoe, who grew up in Austria, does a serviceable impersonation of someone from Mitchells Plain. He manfully attempted a “hou jou bek” in the first episode. We need to talk about Trond Espen Seim, however. For a man who grew up in Goodwood, his character sure does have a thick Norwegian accent — though he throws in a lot of “howzits” to compensate.
Kodjoe plays a former member of the Hawks assigned to a series of mysterious murders. The credits list his character’s name as “Sanctus Snook”, but that surname is pure “snoek” to any Capetonian. One moment that made me freeze came when Snook complained to his partner about the unwillingness of racist white witnesses to give him information. “People like that don’t talk to k ****** ,” he says. I had to rewind to make sure I’d heard it properly.
In the time-honoured tradition of this genre, Snook is partnered with a detective who is entirely unwilling to collaborate. “I work alone,” says Espen Seim’s character, hardbitten chainsmoker Mat Joubert (or, as I call him, Olaf Lars Olafssen).
Joubert is a tortured soul, because his wife got murdered. Loads of people secretly think he did it. It’s the logical conclusion, if you look at the domestic violence rates for police members. Fortunately, everyone Joubert runs into has a loved one who has also died under mysterious circumstances, which allows him to establish an instant rapport with them.
Kodjoe has been voted one of the most beautiful people in the world, but it’s Cape Town that steals the scene here. Sexy as hell, the city is by turns alluring and brooding. If only it would stop hosting so many murders.