"But I Digress ..." (13 page)

My kind of serial killer

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 3 NOVEMBER 2002

N
OW WHERE IS
Hannibal Lecter when you really need him? I have of late been thinking about Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter, I am compelled to admit, is my kind of guy.

I have always liked Hannibal Lecter, I suppose, in a distant sort of way. He had a fine nose for perfume and a way with women that impressed me. Like John Malkovich chatting up Michelle Pheiffer in
Dangerous Liasons
, Hannibal Lecter in
Silence of the Lambs
touched a nerve deep in every young man's heart. “Say, I don't need a flashy car or an expensive haircut in order to interest the ladies,” every young man realised, on some deep and perhaps inarticulate level. “All I need is to learn how to speak to them. Maybe not precisely like Hannibal Lecter speaks to Jodie Foster – in some circles that may be regarded as a little creepy, and not
all
women respond well to the rumbling threat of being eaten on the first date – but he does seem to know a thing or two about holding up his end of the conversation.”

What was captivating about Hannibal Lecter in
Silence of the Lambs
was that he was himself captured. His power was the power of a low voice in the darkness, like a brooding fallen Lucifer plotting one day to get back up there where the air is rarefied. It was comforting to a young man. When you are a young man without money, a vehicle or much by way of desirable social resources, life can feel very similar to a solitary cell in a maximum-security prison: you can't go anywhere and you have to wear unattractive clothing and your only companions are other men in a similar social position with unattractive personal habits. Ah, but with a voice and a mind, Hannibal Lecter could transcend all that! And win an Oscar too! Hannibal Lecter was a quiet inspiration.

But last week, tucked up on the sofa with a barrel of fried chicken, a full heart and
Hannibal
(M-Net, Sunday, 8pm), it occurred to me that Hannibal Lecter on the loose is altogether a different proposition. I had not seen the sequel before, although I had nearly watched it one night in wintry Amsterdam when I was on my own and at a loose end. (Traditionally single men at night in Amsterdam find other entertainment than an Anthony Hopkins movie, but I was not much tempted by such ruddy delights. The human body is capable of many splendours and wonders, but I would like to keep some of them as a surprise for my middle age. Besides, even alone and in Amsterdam, there are some loose ends at which you do not want to be.)

I had chosen not to watch
Hannibal
that night, even though there was an English-language print showing in a theatre somewhere off the Kaizersgracht, because I was already lonely and cold and in a foreign city, with the canals stirring slow and dark and menacing. The last thing I needed was to feel lonely and cold in a foreign city with the pressing suspicion that I am being followed down the side alleys by a cannibal in a Panama hat. But last Sunday I was not lonely and I was not cold, and all of a sudden I found myself wishing that I had Hannibal Lecter on personal retainer.

In
Hannibal
, Hannibal Lecter is on the loose. Outside of prison, much of his personal power is dissipated. His voice and his personality are not as important – he can buy things and wear disguises and even become involved in tussles with the forces of evil. Well, the
other
forces of evil. It is, I suppose, a little like being a young man grown older. Life is a little easier and much more fun but not necessarily as dramatic. I identified far less with Hannibal Lecter in the second movie, but I approved of him even more.

Hannibal Lecter kills and eats people. Big deal, you might say. There are plenty of people who kill and eat people. But Hannibal Lecter's gimmick is that he prefers to kill and eat people who
deserve
it, not because they are immoral or unethical, but because they are without grace or taste. Oh, what a thought! The problem with serial killers is that they are so random. Worse: they are often fairly uncouth individuals themselves. What could be a more dismal fate than being randomly killed and eaten by some unshaven yob scratching his belly and listening to
The Best of Queen
in his pick-up truck? But if serial killers were calm and rational and dedicated to making the world a better place by removing, not the sinners and the harlots, but the bad mannered and the poorly dressed, I would be all in favour of them. Ah, would that there were a squadron of Hannibal Lecters.

Different serial killers resemble different understandings of God. I would love to believe in a God like Hannibal Lecter – an individual of taste and breeding, punishing those who jump queues or who have facial piercings or who bring babies to restaurants or who insist on telling you jokes. Sadly, in my limited experience, if God is a serial killer, he more closely resembles the Washington sniper. It is a random harvest.

Such at any rate were my thoughts, late of a Sunday evening, having watched Hannibal Lecter eat part of the living brain of Ray Liotta with a knife and fork. At such moments my mind turns frequently to improving the world. If only we could identify the part of the brain that enjoys
Big Brother
, and that makes people stand reading their transaction slip at the ATM instead of stepping aside already, and that invented the mullet hairstyle. If only we could, I might just turn Hannibal myself. Pass the salt.

Here's to you, Mrs Robinson

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 24 NOVEMBER 2002

I
HAVE TO CONFESS
, and I suppose this is as good a place as any to do my confessing. My confession is this: I have of late, I know not why, been troubled by curious dreams. I say “curious”, but I am being discreet. These dreams are more than curious – they cause me to wake in the night, trembling and mopping myself and reaching for a glass of water. There is pleasure involved in these dreams, but they are guilty pleasures. They are not the sorts of pleasures you would want to tell your mother.

The sum and essence of my problem – the nub, you might say – is Anne Robinson. Oh go on, you know Anne Robinson. Anne Robinson is the Torquemada of Trivia, the Grand Inquisitor of the Intellect. Anne Robinson is a torturer, a tyrant, a short, female, bespectacled, red-headed Idi Amin of the airwaves. God, I love that woman.

Anne Robinson presents
The Weakest Link
(BBC Prime, DStv, weekdays, 7.05pm) in much the same way that Daisy de Melker presented her husband with his morning coffee. But unlike Daisy de Melker, Anne Robinson doesn't smile. It would be fair to say that Anne Robinson is sarcastic, but only if you agree that it would be fair to say that Ronnie Biggs had no respect for the law, or that the shark in
Jaws
had pointy teeth and he showed them pearly white. In Anne Robinson's hands, sarcasm is an artistic medium. It is expressive, it is aesthetic and it causes you to question your assumptions about the world, which is apparently what contemporary artists understand to be the principal purpose of art. Anne Robinson's sarcasm, indeed, could win the Turner Prize. Come to think of it, that would be a bright day for contemporary art, when you consider the sort of threadbare balderdash that
does
win the Turner Prize.

The Weakest Link
is an English question-and-answer game show in which a procession of spotty Brits take turns to quail and crumble beneath the gimlet gaze of Anne Robinson. (“Do you even know what a gimlet is?” Anne Robinson asked me in my dream last night. “Er … uh … it is a small tool that bores things, isn't it?” I stammered. “And does that description fit anyone else in this room, would you say?” said Anne Robinson. I blushed and lowered my head in a kind of furious ecstasy of abasement.)

Anne Robinson's greatest asset, besides the ability to convince you she is wearing leather thighboots and a riding crop beneath her black ankle-length coat, is a talent for making you believe she knows all the answers to all the questions. Anne Robinson, you would swear, is omniscient and omnipotent, and she knows when you've been naughty, and she knows when you've been nice. When you answer incorrectly, she looks at you with such mingled disappointment and contempt that you feel – yea, verily, you
feel
– that your coming chastisement is proper and deserved and you only wish she would find it in herself to punish you a little longer.

“Roy, what do you do for a living?” Anne Robinson asked a portly fellow on the show this week.

“I'm a comedian, Anne,” he replied bravely.

“Really?” said Anne, with a voice that could be used to perform keyhole surgery. “Are you a professional comedian, Roy, or do you mean your friends think that you are a bit of a card down at the pub?”

Roy swallowed heavily. “No, no, I'm a professional,” he said gamely.

“So people pay you to be funny, do they, Roy? You must be very funny indeed. Tell us a joke.”

Roy did not want to tell a joke. Roy would rather have performed an emergency appendectomy on himself using his own teeth than tell a joke at that moment. But when Anne Robinson speaks, strong men bend the knee. Roy told a joke. I could scarcely hear the joke, I was in such agonies of masculine sympathy. Anne Robinson listened to Roy's joke. Her face was as the face of Pharaoh Akhenaten on a mural in the Luxor necropolis. The Pharaoh Akhenaten was not remembered by antiquity for his sense of humour, particularly in necropolises.

“Roy,” said Anne Robinson.

Roy shuffled his feet and dropped his eyes. “Yes, Anne,” said Roy.

“Do you know any
funny
jokes, Roy?” said Anne Robinson.

Oh, how she haunts my dreams. Night after night she returns, her stiletto heels clacking on my floor and across my chest, mouth pursed with the inward pleasure of kindness withheld, asking me questions, always questions, questions that torment and mock, questions with no answers. “If it's called
Business
Class,” she demands, “why do they allow babies in?” and “Where is the reflexology pressure point for feet?” and “Do hot cakes really sell better than other sorts of cakes?”

And when I cannot reply, oh what awful scenes there do follow. Such scenes as I cannot describe, lest your parrot read the lining of its cage and be irredeemably corrupted. Needless to say, I am concerned. I haven't had such dreams since those dark days in the early eighties when I was visited nightly by the lady from the Morkels adverts. Do you remember her? I can't explain it either. I can only remind myself of the story that many of the male members of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, and indeed her political opponents, reported erotic dreams about the Boss. Consider that, and join me in turning my face towards the heavens and asking, in a trembling voice, “Ye gods! What horrors lurk in the heart of men?”

While we strive each day to walk the straight and narrow path, through the meadows and the broad and sunlit uplands, alas our darker drives are not ours to command. Oh, we men are beasts. We deserve to be punished.

On stage with Jerry Springer

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 19 JANUARY 2003

H
AVE YOU EVER
wondered how the producers of Jerry Springer's American show lure their guests on air? I have. Every episode features some or other variety of grinning hillbilly who has contacted the show in order to air his or her toothless atrocities, and each of those stories entails bringing into the studio some ungrinning hillbillies, the artless victims of those atrocities, who have no idea why they are there. I am not myself a hillbilly, toothed or otherwise, so I have never really understood precisely why a man would say to his wife, “Sure, honey, I'll be a guest with you on
The Jerry Springer Show
. Won't tell me what it's about, eh? No problem. Say, why are we bringing granddad and the vacuum cleaner with us?”

Surely, I have always thought, the producers must use some other cunning strategem to lure the witless on stage. And then this week, sitting in the Green Room backstage at Jerry Springer's South African show, drinking complimentary vodka through a straw while waiting to be called for makeup, a terrible thought occurred to me. What if their cunning strategem is to phone and say: “We would like you to be a guest on Jerry's chat show. No, no, not that show, the other one. The
respectable
one.”

The thought made me wobble a little at the knees. I scoured my memory for indiscretions and the kind of harmless youthful eccentricities you pay witnesses to keep quiet about. I didn't fancy the prospect of bounding on stage to be confronted with a Greek chorus of bad memories pointing their fingers at me while the audience hissed and checked its dictionaries to get a clearer picture of my perversions. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with smart alecs making barnyard sounds whenever I entered a room.

Jerry Springer's Saturday Night
(M-Net, Saturdays, after the movie) is Jerry Springer's other show. Unlike his American series, it has no truck with adulterers, paedophiles, incestuous love triangles and foot fetishists. No, wait, that's not true – rather, the adulterers, paedophiles, incestuous love triangles and foot fetishists with which it has truck don't actually admit to it. The idea of the show is that Jerry interviews local celebrities of interest. Hands up who can spot the fatal flaw in that idea.

For some weeks now I have felt immensely sorry for Jerry Springer. Imagine flying 25 hours out of Chicago once a month to interview Heinz Winkler or Amore Vittone. No really – imagine it. Speaking to Heinz Winkler must be something like sticking your head inside an empty washing machine and murmuring phrases in Esperanto. Except after five minutes of interviewing Heinz Winkler, you would want to turn the washing machine on. With your head still inside.

Some weeks ago I watched Jerry interviewing a radio DJ named Nicole Fox. What questions can you think of to ask radio DJ Nicole Fox? Me neither. Neither could Jerry. The interview consisted of Jerry gallantly saying “You don't have a face for radio,” and radio DJ Nicole Fox agreeing between cackles of the kind of laughter that terrified the Munchkins when they heard it swooping overhead. Sometimes she would cackle even when Jerry hadn't said anything. “Gee,” I remember saying aloud to my bourbon, “how deep are they going to have to reach for guests? I hope there is someone leaning over that barrel with mighty long arms.”

Apparently their arms are like the tentacles of a giant squid, because last night there I was, sweating in front of the cameras, trying to remember which is my best side, or whether I even have a best side, and cursing those extra helpings of Christmas pudding. I was on screen for 10 minutes, which means three hours idling in the Green Room beforehand, hoovering up the buffet and playing “I-spy” with the other guests. My heart sank when I arrived to find Mark Banks, resplendent on the waiting-room sofa, wearing a shirt shiny and green and ornate, like a Muslim Christmas tree. You don't want to be on the same show as Mark Banks. Mark Banks is very funny, and a funny guest makes other guests look dull. If you're a guest, you want to avoid Mark Banks as a rabid dog avoids his water bowl. You want to be on a show with, say, Heinz Winkler or radio DJ Nicole Fox.

During an ad break, Tobie Cronjé and I stripped down and oiled up and engaged in a bout of Greco-Roman wrestling to decide who would have to go on directly after Mark Banks. Tobie was surprisingly powerful and had several painful grappling moves, but I am proud to announce that the correspondent for your quality Sunday newspaper won through. Panic lent strength to my headlock.

In the end it was all very jolly backstage, after the vodka kicked in. I met a group of pleasant young men calling themselves the Sons of Trout, who I imagine are some manner of religious cult, but very polite with it. There was a blonde woman named Wes-Lee who claimed to be some manner of singer. “So, what do you do?” we asked each other simultaneously.

The interview passed in a blur and a stammer and a hot tick-tock. I was pleased to note that there were no Tennessee mountain folk on stage accusing me of impregnating their goats or their trailer vans, but less pleased to notice the collective sigh of disappointment from the audience when I emerged. I think they had been expecting Simon Gear.

Afterwards the producers patted me kindly on the shoulders. “Never mind,” they said, “you did your best.”

After the show a member of the audience sidled up and asked me for an autograph. “Certainly,” I said, beaming graciously, taking up a pen with a flourish.

“Not yours. Jerry's,” said the audience member. He looked at me narrowly. “What's your name again?”