Obfuscation and those wide open legs
DEREK Watts says his memoirs, when he eventually gets down to them (at the mention of which his wife, Belinda, rolls her eyes), will be called Please Can You Close Your Legs for the Opening Shot? in reference to a story he did on South Africa’s self-appointed king of nudity, Beau Brummell. He was about to interview Beau’s naked 16year-old daughter Cheyenne on growing up in a nudist colony, and cameraman John Parr was forced to ask that question. It was 1992 and Brummell, in a move he said was to celebrate Mandela’s release, had opened his whites-only nudist colony, Beau Valley, to black nudists.
As if that wasn’t enough, he’d decided to go the whole liberated hog and invite gays too. Now Beau was facing financial ruin. The white shareholders had pulled out because of the “blacks who walked around with erections and gays who had sex in the swimming pool”.
Derek, John and then-producer Linda Vermaas remember few details of the story and more about being the only fully clothed people in a sea of nudity. And they were struck by Beau’s beautiful teenage daughter, who had grown up completely at ease with being naked in front of adults. But she was omitted from the final edit because, said Linda, it didn’t seem appropriate. In any event, the story that went on air had little to do with Beau’s new-found liberal ideas and resultant financial woes and more about South Africa’s confusing censorship laws.
In an interview with a fully clothed Derek, the naked 1960s
This is an extract from the book ‘Carte Blanche: The Stories Behind The Stories’ by Jessica Pitchford (Jonathan Ball) R200
pop singer and B-movie actor complained about a police raid in which brochures advertising Beau Valley were confiscated, as well as some foreign naturist magazines. The raid posed an interesting question for a South Africa emerging from a repressive and strictly censored era: What exactly defined pornography?
The raid on Beau’s house at the nudist colony had been conducted by the South African Narcotics Bureau (Sanab). Cap- tain Piet Senekal recited to Derek a long list of what was considered obscene under the Publications Act of 1974. The act’s definition of obscene ranged from licentiousness and lust to lesbianism. But, said the captain, nudity was not pornographic. So what law had Beau fallen foul of? Piet wasn’t too sure but said they’d received “complaints”.
It was clearly no simple matter, so Derek and Linda headed off to the old Publications Appeal Board, where they were told by chairman Daan Morkel that while sexual titillation wasn’t deemed undesirable, “provoking lust” certainly was.
Derek asked if the Beau Valley brochures of naked people sailing, swimming and braaing were lust-provoking. Chairman Daan, the oranje-blanje-blou of the old flag behind him, wasn’t sure, but he said one wouldn’t like to see them in cafés or in dentist “shops”. How about at a nudist colony, which is where they were? Daan conceded that, if limited to select people, they couldn’t be “undesirable”, but said that the board never found anything to be “desirable”.
Derek looked baffled and concluded that perhaps pornography was like an elephant: hard to define, but no mistaking it when confronted by it.
The entire Carte Blanche story featured images the board would definitely have considered undesirable, even a fullfrontal from the movie Lady Chatterley’s Lover, screened on M-Net a few weeks before — a sign that apartheid was crumbling and a new world was beckoning.