How I met your mother.
An origin story
I've written about Cape Town here and Johannesburg here, but this is where it all began.
When The Agency opened its Store Street premises everyone got a big grey desktop, a swivel chair, a cool Tizio desk lamp, a drawer unit, three shelves, a pinboard, a telephone with lots of buttons, an Apple computer, a vase of white lilies and two plastic boxes of business cards with your name printed on them. To each, their own little corner in the best company in the world.
Later, some of us were given a 'pocket phone'. It was an Ericsson, with a stubby little antennae. Later still, some of us got to play with a prototype Ericsson with inbuilt camera; nobody could figure out why you'd need it or who you'd send the novelty pictures to. It got a resounding thumbs-down.
Ericsson was one of our clients. We liked Ericsson, they were Swedish. Do you know why they pursued the emancipation of phones? Because in Sweden there are millions of islands and the land freezes in the winter and they couldn’t bury cables.
I went to Ericsson’s Stockholm headquarters to present an idea for a film to a man named Bo. I liked Bo, he was Swedish. His office was relaxed.
It was one of those presentations that just felt good; you're nervous at first, but then as you walk through the scenes you get into the swing of it and you realise you actually believe in the story you're telling. You're not selling, you're giving.
(It's a bit like cooking for a dinner party: you're not flogging the idea of eating to your guests, you just want them to have a good time. And although you worry you might have overreached yourself, you realise that you've put a lot of you into it, so you eventually relax because you think, ah well, for better or worse, there it is and here I am.)
I remember Bo smiling. I remember realising that I can really see all of these scenes I'm describing, I can see them in my mind's eye, and now all I want is permission to make them real.
And Bo sits back and says to me - so, when can I see it?
When Jordan first mentioned Cape Town as a potential location for the Ericsson film I pretended not to be excited but I was beside myself. Africa! I'd never been to Africa. I was scared and thrilled in equal amounts.
When I thought of Cape Town in particular I had an image of colonial houses with wrought-iron verandahs and rotating ceiling fans. The air would be sticky with insects. Ships dashed on rocky coastlines. Perhaps there were baboons, and spiders, and snakes. I knew about the Cape of Good Hope from the apple boxes in my greengrocer's shop. Didn't the Man From Del Monte come from there?
Nothing good came from South Africa, of course. Or rather, nobody good went there. We knew all the stories, or thought we did. Apartheid had only ended officially four years previously. People still sang I never met a nice South African in British pubs, and meant it.
But I wanted to go to Africa very badly, I wanted to feel what it was like.
When you will yourself to fall in love, it can happen very quickly. Up in the sky it was still too unreal, especially when we banked around that big blousy flirt Table Mountain, but when we landed, when we got our bags, when we walked out of the terminal… the air!
Of course you're all geed-up and you've got dreams to make and the sky is a different kind of blue and people are yelling & trying to sell you stuff and you haven't been shot dead yet so that's a bonus, I mean you're bound to get a bit of a crush in all the strangeness, but a tenacious little bug got in through the pores of my skin in that airport carpark and the bloody thing never found its way out again.
Waiting in the Sea Point hotel, on my bed, was a huge zippered canvas hold-all stuffed with goodies: maps, beach towel, hat, takkies, sun cream, Windhoek beers, biltong, Spar-letta Creme Soda, Zoo Biscuits. Everything you need for a holiday, and maybe even a shoot, courtesy of the film company who were hosting us.
My 'room' was a suite of three and I couldn't work out which bit I was meant to sleep in. Downstairs the restaurant had guava juice, which was exotic. I met a nice woman called Sissie who called me 'sir'. I said Sissie, I'm not a sir I'm Kevin, and can I have some more of that amazing juice? She giggled- yebo, Sir Kevin.
We were just two at this point, me and Jordan, director and producer. Jordan had sailed the seven seas but I don't think she'd been to Cape Town.
A young lad called Neil met us in the hotel reception and drove us in a roundabout way to an address in Gardens. We drove around Signal Hill, which initially I thought was Table Mountain, until we turned into the amazing amphitheatre of the City Bowl and the scales fell from our eyes and we beheld THE MOTHER MOUNTAIN with its tablecloth spilling and evaporating in dreamy white slow motion over the rooftops.
The city was gridded, and hot. We drove up a long straight road towards the mountain, past a big brick police station with a row of grizzly armoured vehicles parked outside. They looked mean. I asked Neil what they were, and he said-fucking rhinos.
Neil turned left to show us District Six. It was mostly bulldozed rubble: a featureless urban expanse criss-crossed by the sort of drab concrete boulevards you'd avoid in Saturday night fight-towns like Reading and Slough.
But this was slap-bang between blue sea and glorious mountain, prime real estate. Yeah, that's the point, said Neal. In the sixties they declared it white-only, 'dozed all the shops and the cafés and the houses then dumped the occupants - mostly Black and Coloured and Indian - out in the Cape Flats.
Now it was nothing, a non-neighbourhood. I did not know what 'Coloured' meant. I was uncomfortable with the language. I was uncomfortable with the accusatory absence of life. Neil drove on.
Three blocks and five minutes later - not even - we were in Gardens. The film production company office was a house with wrought-iron verandahs and rotating ceiling fans. Behind the colonial shutters were two blokes who owned the company and one woman who did all the work. Lisa was her name and she was great.
There comes a moment in every job when the talking stops and the action begins. But when the time for words is over, sussie, you better make sure the words you used were the right ones, and your intentions were well understood. Well, I remember clearly. I remember the moment I knew that our Cape Town producer knew what we were all about, and I could relax because we were in her safe hands.
And I can tell you, broer, that this has not always been my experience.
Lisa quietly assembled a core team of Cape Town allies while Jordan and I went on the road for a week of back-to-back recces. Our Location Manager Elmarie drove us around in her big butch bakkie. She showed us the wonders and the unwonders, and took no shit from anyone, especially me.
Elmarie had the uncanny knack - known only film scouts and their kin - of being able to woo any stranger and open any locked door.
We went to Bantry Bay and Llandudno. We went to Hout Bay and Noordhoek and over the mountain to Kalk Bay and Muizenberg. We went to a thousand streets and abandoned warehouses in Claremont and Obs and Woodstock.
We went to a farm where a man who looked like Moses showed us the baboon in his freezer that he'd killed in a fist fight.
We went to a disused lunatic asylum in Tamboerskloof where the Cape wind used to drive the inmates (more) crazy. We saw penguins. We ate seafood in Panama Jacks out on an oily quay, and posed in larny Blues in Camps Bay with all the other media yah-yahs.
One time, we were on a shopping street somewhere and I heard singing. The singing got louder and louder, and there was an odd rhythmic klump-klump kind of sound. Elmarie grabbed me and I was bundled through a doorway and down to the back of a shop. What the-? I pushed my way back to the front window and watched as a thousand or so black students danced past. They weren’t marching, they were DANCING and they were singing and laughing, and as they flew by they STAMPED their feet with a klump! and a klump-klump! It was amazing, the power, the energy. I’d never seen anything like it. What was that? A protest, says Elmarie. To this day I have no idea why they were protesting or why I was bundled off the scene.
But I did get myself into a few awkward situations, mostly of the street sort. You see, the trouble is, Cape Town is so goddam BEAUTIFUL you forget that it's also dangerous. Thank god for Elmarie who saved my scrawny white (going red) neck a bunch of times.
-Get in the car.
-But this alley is perfect! Bit of art department, you know, make it a bit more authentic-looking. I'll just wait for these chaps to move along-
-Get in the fucking car! Now!!
But mainly I put my foot in it by mouthily deploying a pitiful understanding of South African history and cultural politics.
I may not have been the first - or the the last - Brit to have made the assumption that all people in South Africa with white skin are Afrikaners, and therefore bad, and all people with black skin are the indigenous oppressed, and therefore good. But it shames me to recall my ignorance.
One time, in a crowded café up on Kloof Nek Road I did my 'ironic' party-piece impression of a 'typical' white South African for the entertainment of my new friends. When I shouted-
-Oy! K----r!
-it was as if I'd thrown a hand grenade - people physically ducked and retreated; the whole place went silent in a heartbeat.
In my defence I thought the word meant something relatively innocuous, I dunno, like 'farmer' or 'worker' or something. Maybe if I'd thought before I’d acted I might have twigged the staggering offence I'd cause by shouting a word that had been historically used to intimidate and strip fellow humans of their dignity. Right here, in this very city. I am truly sorry.
I think I offended quite a few people that week, simply by trying to be Right On when actually I was Wrong On.
But here's the thing: it was dealt with, and everyone moved on. What I love most about South Africans is that they get on with shit. If you want to get something done, if you ever want a person to go ahead and make something happen, then choose a bloody Saffa every time. 'n Boer maak 'n plan, as they say in SA.
And while we’re on the subject of race and nationality and all that stuff, I just want to say this. Amongst the crew of thirty that Lisa put together we had black skin and white, women and men, Xhosa and Zulu speakers as well as old-school Dutch. We had soldiers who'd fought in Angola working alongside former ANC activists. Every one of them had a different story, and every one of them was South African. They got themselves a new constitution and a new National Anthem (way better than mine) and they got on with it.
Hmm I seem to have not got on with it. Well, not fast enough. There’s a lot more to tell. See you next week!
My favourite job and Director ever . The crew still talk about it 🤗
❤️