Who was John Perlman anyway

In the most absolute sense of the 'breaking news business' John Perlman is history, and so why are we now talking about him? Who was this guy who has captured the headlines in almost every major newspaper around town this past month [according to the billboards hung up on poles all over the city]. Not one [of the regulars] at any of my various favourite watering holes canvassed this week had ever heard of him; although many could tell me that Manchester United was thinking of selling Christiano Renaldo to Real Madrid for sixty million euros - For those who never heard him as well as those who loved his work:

Fare thee well John Perlman, master radio broadcaster: may the road ahead of you swell with possibility.



Some months ago I mentioned in one of my blogs how I was faced with a quandary. The two, arguably finest broadcasters in the country, albeit in different genres, were abruptly going to be sitting in the same time slot. You'll remember that Gareth Cliff moved from the pm drive time slot to the am drive time slot on five FM-. [for my offshore readers we refer to name players on South Africa's/South Azania's/ SA's daily broadcast radio stations- one, John Perlman, presenting the serious BBC style 'news and news analysis daily dredge report', the other, Gareth Cliff, the incisive fluff and froth presenter of the: 'don't-give-a-fuck-anyway-I-can't-do-anything-about-it-so-why-depress-myself- when I can just rip it off.' station called five FM]

I was in a true dilemma, in fact a triple dilemma because neither station plays the best popular music on radio- that honour goes to UJFM the new University of Johannesburg station that is 'young enough to bend the rules' their music is great and they play all the most glorious music from this renaissance in rock that we are having in our country today, their continuity is often delightful and sometime outrageous, their series on the use of sexual appliances this week was hysterical and entertained me through some of the worst traffic conditions we've had in the city since forever during the longest heatwave we've had since forever. They even have unusual and intriguing news broadcasts although their news reading skills suck.

Which is where Perlman is the extreme professional and has no peer in this country, notwithstanding that there are many competent broadcasters. I wouldn't quite put him in the same league as CNBC's Maria Bartiromo because no matter how good he is he still carries the sub-text of servility towards the 'big political' machine; and the knowledge of his own political impotence blocked his vocal clarity at times- there is no voice as truly free as the voice of a real freeborn human.

It is sad though since he was the best of the best to think that the future of news broadcasting and interviewing in 'the Beloved Country' is going to trend toward that higgledy piggeldy approach to pronunciation, enunciation and general confused clarity of thought [if I may construct such an oxymoron] that we are 'eared' with: most grotesquely by UJ, but evident no matter which station one surfs through [as right I'll make an exception for Classic FM, which hardly qualifies as popular radio though.].

I resolved my own problem back then [and still do] by surfing through from Five to UJ to SAFM AMLive depending on what was happening at the time- the guy who does Classic in the morning is just too paternalistically poncy for me to handle in traffic that early; so when everything sucks on the above three, which it does from time to time, I switch to the six cd shuttle and play something from the "100 best Baroque" series that I gave myself for Christmas.

Perlman was always superb, except when he had a stressful run and he forgot to do his breathing exercises and his voice would rise an octave or so and he would become stridently assertive in the manner of the soon to depart leader of the 'official' opposition. It is rather intriguing, while mentioning, how all these plaintively assertive high profile liberals [the Oppenheimers, Leon and now Perlman ] are decamping their roles in our society- as if clearing the decks- for what?

Notwithstanding Perlman's undoubted skill as an interrogative broadcaster his programme has always been a funereal exercise in terminal depression- This is not due to any fault on his part; he always attemped to force some kind of intellectual response from the daily litany of deadbeat lightweight voices that populate the programme's content. There are regulars of course that don't fall into that category. I don't miss Martin Creamer's "Engineering News" which is always worth a hearing: always some fascinating nugget of information to tease away at the imagination on a routine basis; and the same goes for that enthusiastic fellow who does the internet news and events slot.

I find the fellow, Swerdlow, who does the film reviews a tad cramped and slightly over the top camp; and have learned that when he really doesn't like a movie it is often worth seeing, and what he does like is often boring as shit. Nonetheless he is entertaining and his use of the Beloved language is that of a wordsmith master: every bit is competent as Perlman, and, unless his piece happens to coincide with Gareth Cliff's deliciously satiric 'Days of our Mourning[sic] Morning', I enjoy listening to him. On the other hand Cliff trumps Swerdlow hands down- the one being a creator the other simply a critic and a natural predatory destroyer- of which type the world is overwhelmed as Honey Santana* would have said. [Nature Girl-Karl Hiaasen]

Perlman's favourite film critic[Swerdlow], who doubles for him sometimes on the various occasion that Perlman has been off duty over the years, is inclined towards a slightly kugel whine however when he is required to put some pressure on his interviewees, and it gives him a grovelling quality: that may well be part of his neural programming- I would imagine you would have to be something of a 'grovelleur' to survive this long in the alleged rascist trending atmosphere that is supposedly SABC*. Today. [South African Broadcasting Corporation, the de facto monopoly broadcaster, if you're an offshore reader].

The silence from the cronyist political hierarchy about Perlman's departure has been clamorous and one suspects enraged chagrin at Trevor Manuel's almost tearful parting last week when Perlman conducted his last post-budget interview.

One almost had the sense that Manuel [The National finance minister] hugged the fellow with brimful tears of sorrow. There is simply no one else in radio today who has/had Perlman's insightful intellect and light delicate touch. Mr Manuel is undeniably the true hero of our Revolution without whom [and not neglecting the role played by Maria Ramos] without whom we would be in such economic shit that the present rate of slaughter on the streets would be a mere aperitif. He recognised Perlman's excellence and having nothing to hide loved the way Perlman could tease out the most arcane elements in his annual offering regarding how he spends OUR money. Both of course understood that there are holes in the plan that should be carefully ignored.

For this was for Perlman the damming weakness of his show. He demanded accountability, and could find little. He was always dammed because his programme has for years been strewn with the residual stench of broken promises, lies and the unspeakably enthusiastic ineptitude of a daily litany of 'breaking news' stories in which the interviewees become less and less credible; leaving us uneasily with that nagging thought about the old Titanic sailing blithely on toward the waiting iceberg.

Perlman held up a mirror and obviously there were people who didn't want to look at themselves that way- The strutting peacocks walking about in tawdry feathers were too often revealed - on the other hand if you could cut it with Perlman you should be a made person, for your cocoon of lies and prevaricated evasions were impervious to reason.

Now I no longer have the problem of what to listen to in the morning I can hop comfortably from Five to UJ depending on whether Cliff is having a moment or my daughter's in the car. After I drop her off at varsity, it's UJ all the way, although I often have to jump stations when the news is on. The pronunciations on the UJ news bulletins are so bad that the consequent distraction, attempting to fathom the meaning of the news item so badly mangled is conducive to traffic accidents. As you know Cape Town, Jozi or Dubai are places where literally hell is on wheels and if one's concentration is not almost totally focussed on what the fool in front/behind/beside you is about to do you will find yourself unwillingly the source of the gridlock referred to on 'jam line'.

Seven years ago I wrote the following piece below about John Perlman and published it in my collection Marginal Man published online earlier this decade [and will be back online soon]. He was less practiced then and would often work himself up about the daily litany of failure that formed the basis of our daily fare on SAFM.

On that particular day he was remonstrating with some avuncular arsehole about the fact that his organisation had billions to spend on so-called 'job-creation' and had created no jobs other than those held by the aforementioned avuncular arsehole and his politically connected cronies. [As my regular readers will know I don't believe politicians are capable of creating jobs but that is for a different blog, and time has borne out this hypothesis since as at the last occasion Perlman interviewed the 'job creation' specialists the jobless rate had in fact risen notwithstanding that we manipulate the statistics to 'prove' that it is falling].


27/7/00
AM LIVE on Malperformance*

If you construct your
Worldview from a place
Within the confines of a
Conjecture then
Getting things done means
Sublimating a self, of which
You are in any event unaware
In an attempt to deal with the world
As it isn't.

This work done by all the
Armies of 'help uplift the helpless'
Specialists: whether Aid, AIDS or other
Community outreach activities which now
Proliferate become ultimately self serving by
Default of eternal recurrence. How to change this
Is the dilemma faced by the individual in society. The
Individual in a free society is free to live as it was or change
Only we ourselves
Can decide whether
We should change.
And then, change to what?
From where? And how do we keep moving.

To call for instant change
To habits that took generations to construct
Is as irrational as tossing grains
Of sand one by one into a leaky forty gallon drum
And then demanding to know ten
Minutes later why the job is incomplete.

The job's the thing. The pay is always
Incomplete; There is no such thing as
Enough
Money
And all these people who are
Organizing these myriad fruitlessly
Ineffective batteries of commissions,
Committees, stakeholders, revolver holders,
Card holders and general handholders have
Involved themselves precisely in order to solve
Their own personal employment problems
By inventing the 'issue solving' mechanism in the
First place. No rational person would seriously attempt
To truly 'solve' the problem being addressed so intimately: for they would then become unemployed.

.NiK(2000)

* [ readers note] The morning host for a popular radio news programme is prone to tetchiness when self serving systemic flunkeys rationalise their failure to deliver on political promises. Some days the failures pile up: he forgets that his role is largely symbolic

Keep on bloggin'
loves ya all
NiK