Salivation army
Top Billing has never met a celeb or a bank or a product that it doesn’t like, writes Rebecca Davis
IADMIT I haven’t read the full EFF election manifesto with the closest of attention, but I’d be surprised if there isn’t a clause or two devoted to Top Billing. When the revolution comes, Jeannie D and the gang may need to skip town pretty sharpish to avoid being first against the wall. Unless, of course, they barter their safety by means of an extended insert featuring Ursula “Brown Sugar” Chikane gushing over this season’s musthave red berets, or Bonang Matheba rhapsodising about the scatter cushions in Julius Malema’s Polokwane shag-pad.
Top Billing has been around for so long that it’s eligible to vote in May’s elections. It missed bornfree status by just two years, but it exemplifies the material aspirations of the post-apartheid era. Canny marketers worked tirelessly in the fresh democratic context that Top Billing grew out of to equate “freedom” with “freedom to consume”. We didn’t struggle to be poor; we struggled for the chance to see Michael Mol show us around a house we could never afford.
It was really perfect, then, that the first episode of the show’s new season saw Janez Vermeiren dispatched to Los Angeles to interview Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street. Vermeiren has an interviewing style best compared to a Labrador puppy, all soft licks and tail-wagging. Debora Patta this ain’t.
Belfort, as you’ll know if you watched the recent biopic about his life starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a disgraced former banker who swindled approximately $200-million from more than 1 000 clients. From the tone of Vermeiren’s interview, you’d have thought Belfort invented something to make disabled kids walk again. Vermeiren even managed to elicit from Belfort’s wife the revelation that the convicted fraudster is “the most sensitive, sweet, loving man”.
Sure, Belfort is now paying back the money to his victims. But you got the sense that what Top Billing secretly admired about Belfort was not his attempts at restitution but the grotesque excess of his former Wall Street lifestyle, consistent with the show’s implied mantra that “more is more”. In his previous life of yachts, mansions, and beautiful women, Belfort was the ultimate Top Billington.
Presenter Jeannie D articulated the show’s values very openly in the same episode. “I love convenience and I love money,” she said, announcing the launch of a new Standard Bank internet banking app. This development was considered so groundbreaking that Top Billing producers dispatched about six presenters to the launch, and then attempted to frame it as if they were there because Standard Bank is such a famous fixture on the party circuit. “When Standard Bank launches a brand new app you have to be there,” one confided to the camera, which will be news to many of us.
This lengthy love letter to Standard Bank was preceded earlier in the programme by a long insert about Woolworths’s new ad campaign. Do Top Billing viewers care that they are relentlessly being marketed to? One suspects not. “I want to see more and more of glam,” one fan recently wrote on the show’s Facebook page. Keep bringing the glam, and nobody gets hurt.
Glam in abundance was provided by Puerto Rican supermodel Joan Smalls in the first episode, with Vermeiren sent to carry out another hard-hitting interview. The admirably self-assured Smalls told the presenter that she completed her degree cum laude ahead of time. “I know, beauty with brains, right?” she said modestly. “That puts you in the 0.001% of people,” Vermeiren enthused. It could be an alternate slogan for Top Billing: Lifestyles of the 0.001%.
Top Billing airs on SABC3 on Thursdays at 8.30pm