THE DAY THE DUCK HAD A STROKE
ShowMax, children, and seven days of television
‘THE past is a foreign country,” wrote the British author LP Hartley: “They do things differently there.” If you’d like to fully comprehend the meaning of these words, I invite you to take a little wander down memory lane on local streaming service Showmax. For the benefit of less tech-savvy readers, Showmax is the local competition to Netflix. There is fairly significant overlap between the international series you can watch on both platforms, but Showmax is the one for you if you are (a) Afrikaans and (b) in the mood for a kids’ TV programme from the last century.
I recently discovered that one of the benefits of a Showmax subscription is that it gives you unfettered access to the earliest episodes of shows like Wielie Walie and Liewe Heksie. I cannot quite imagine the viewer who would seek these out for purposes other than wallowing in apartheid nostalgia. Are there any parents out there who have decided to eschew modern kids’ TV programming in order to force-feed their offspring a diet of rudimentary Afrikaans animation from the mid-1970s? Maybe Steve Hofmeyr. If you are Steve Hofmeyr, please write in to confirm or deny.
As a producer of South African kids’ TV series back in the day, your best and truest friend was the humble sock puppet. I for one am happy that the heyday of sock puppets appears to be behind us, because they are rubbish. Even allowing for the fact that it was a simpler time, only a child with serious mental deficiencies could fail to perceive that what they were watching was a fabric-covered human hand. Sock puppets also never shut the hell up, because the only action they’re capable of is yapping.
Sock puppets were one of the staples of Wielie Walie in 1976, which from the perspective of 2016 turns out to be a hallucinogenic cocktail of puppetry, animation and real-life actors. It’s like a confusing mixed-medium art project. The show also attempted to mix high jinks with distinctly dry informative lectures delivered by woodland creatures on topics like the natural world. A bewildering amount of time is given to a duck which appears to be constantly in the middle of some sort of stroke.
The early Wielie Walie universe is a friendly and restful place, as befitting a kids’ TV programme. It does make one feel a little queasy, however, to remember that in the same year that white children were being introduced to the talking socks and the demented duck, black kids were being murdered by police for asking to be taught in English. But that’s the other thing about the past: sometimes we need 40 years’ distance to see it clearly.