Opinion

Lowbrow entertainment is great mind-numbing TV for intellectuals

February 07, 2010 Edition 1

Mary Corrigall

ALMOST every television viewer is addicted to a show that they are embarrassed to admit watching.

After a few glasses of bubbly a friend confessed to me that she had a penchant for watching poker on TV. I was also surprised to discover that a prominent conceptual artist I know had a weakness for The Bold and the Beautiful (SABC1, 6pm).

After a hard day of mind-gruell-ing toil he said he loved nothing more than to lie back on the sofa and get sucked into the dramas that beset the phony fashion set in this never-ending soapie. I gave up watching The Bold and The Beautiful in standard eight, when I realised that in real life one rarely encountered chiselled-chinned men named after a natural phenomenon (Ridge, Thorn) and that it wasn't socially acceptable for someone to date everyone in a family.

But there is no logic whatsoever to TV addictions or indulgences and it seems that the more intellectually demanding your work the more likely you are to revel in frothy TV products. Perhaps there is even a kind of kudos attached to watching trashy telly, a sort of recognition or acceptance that the boundaries between high and low culture really have been eroded.

Fact is, everyone needs balance in their life. A well-known intellectual I know let it slip that he rather enjoyed watching the Teletubbies (BBC's Cbeebies) with his daughter. He tried to defend his indulgence by suggesting he enjoyed its "abstract" qualities. But really, I think there is no point in trying to understand why we watch some of the programmes that we do.

Certainly, I haven't clue why I enjoy watching Split Ends (The Style Network, 7pm), which I am embarrassed to admit appears to have some kind of a hold on me. Like all wicked TV treats, I never sought this series out, it found me late one night when I had tried, with little success, to fall asleep and thought that watching banal TV would bring on drowsiness. After skipping across several channels looking for the most mind-numbing show, I finally settled on Split Ends: really, what could be more dull than watching a reality show featuring two hairdressers swapping salons for a few days?

Having spent more than my fair share of time inside these temples for tresses and found such places to be conducive to drab chit-chat, I felt certain that my eyelids would feel droopy in no time at all.

But I was quite mistaken. Before I could say "perm" I had become entranced by the politics of hair cutting and hair salon rivalry. It seems I haven't been paying attention at salons. Now I know each hair salon has its own approach to the craft. So much so that it can be traumatic for a hairdresser to be transplanted in a "foreign" salon that does not coincide with their worldview.

In an episode of Split Ends in which a Texas blonde is sent to work at a Baltimore salon that caters for punk rockers, the poor Texan didn't only look out of sync with the rest of the crew, but she was out of her depth when she had to help a client transform his hair into flames of fire. Yes, your everyday flames of fire hairdo. I think I would have just set a match to his hair and be done with it, but the poor Texan, who'd only ever done highlights, spent hours fashioning his hair into orange and red spires that resembled a strelitzia.

It was a cruel test set by a mean bunch of punk rocker hairdressers, who were nasty and unwelcoming and for all their so-called liberal outlooks demonstrated their narrow-mindedness by not accepting anyone who didn't look like them.

This is maybe what I find so fascinating about this show; the clashes between the different social groups and those from small towns and cosmopolitan cities. If one tries to think of a local equivalent it would probably be like taking a hairdresser from Pofadder, who is used doing granny perms, and putting her or him to work in a busy up-market Joburg salon.

Basically, the series isn't about hair at all, but about the negative stereotypical perceptions people have about each other and themselves and how the misconceptions can be ironed out. Mind you, it often takes more than a hair-iron to achieve. Some disparities between the participants are irreconcilable, such as in an episode where an earth-loving hairdresser couldn't bring herself to use conventional hair products and chose to hang from a tree outside the salon.

Mostly it is the ones who pride themselves as liberals, as unconventional who are the most inflexible.

Perhaps every TV show, no matter how lowbrow, offers us insight into human foibles.