If not doing crime is playing a role in fighting crime, then I’m cool with that. If the president or Pallo Jordan wants me to don a flak jacket and get out there, leopard-crawling through the streets of Johannesburg looking for baddies, then they’ve got the wrong guy. I briefly considered a career as a policeman but then saw how badly they get paid for walking counter-intuitively toward gunfire instead of running like the blazes in the other direction.

Asking the nation to “all play a role in fighting crime” is abdicating responsibility. It’s also encouraging vigilantism, a slippery slope that could only end badly. It’s not our role to fight crime, just as it is not our role to fix potholes in the road or to speed around in those bright red shiny engines putting out fires. There are people who are employed to do those things, and get paid to do them. I just have to do my own job, pay my tax bill and then all of that comes as part of the service.

Sure, if I become aware of a pending crime I should report it. If I am contemplating doing something bad, then I should stop it. And I should raise my children to know that crime is bad, honest work is good. But that’s where my role in fighting crime begins and ends. I can do no more.

It’s not like other national priorities. Tell me that I have a role to play in alleviating poverty and I can see that: I can employ people, contribute time and money to NGOs working with the poor, and so on. Tell me that I have a role to play in educating our people and I get it — I can help my domestic worker to put her daughter through college; I can help her complete her own studies.

In a small way I can help with those. But I can’t help fight crime. I can help prevent crime — by building higher walls around my house, getting vicious dogs and lining the inside of my car with high-voltage electric wire — but those measures aren’t fighting crime. They’re protecting me from criminals. The problem has not been solved — it has just been diverted to the unfortunate guys down the road who haven’t yet had the croc-infested moat dug around their property.

There’s a loveable redneck singer called Charlie Daniels who once penned the poetic lines “Now I’m not the kind of man who would harm a mouse, but if I catch somebody breakin’ in my house, I got a 12-gauge shotgun waiting on the other side”. I’m with him. I don’t have a gun of any description, but if an unarmed someone tried to break into my house and I caught him, then I’d do my best to beat the living crap out of him. If he had a gun, I would pretty much do what he told me to do. It’s called the law of averages and when they’re against you, accept it and move on.

The problem with the words of our government on the issue is that they might embolden me to do something stupid and think, “Hey — the Prez said I should fight crime, so let me take on this dude with a gun … where’s my potato peeler?” Get real.

Those urging us to “do our bit” are engaging in a wily psychological trick — getting us to believe that we’re all in this together and we must unite to fight crime. In other words, don’t apportion blame for a crime rate that makes a holiday in Hanoi in 1966 seem like a honeymoon. If there’s lots of crime, then we haven’t been pulling our weight. And we must take the blame rather than place it at the feet of those who are actually paid to take care of it. Genius piece of spin.

I lived here for seven happy years before venturing through the curtain of pallid stares from eyes-too-close-together in the dusty Karoo and settling in the Cape. Returning — as I do nearly weekly — is always illuminating.

This week in Johannesburg, as listeners to 702 will know, is “Piles Awareness Week”. When the advert for it came on the radio I thought it was another Tom London promo, but the solemn man in the ad alerted me to the fact that the itchy feeling around my anus could, in fact, be something else.

Why do piles need an awareness week? If you’ve got them, then presumably you’re painfully aware of them already. And if you don’t, you don’t want to be. Something odd is happening in Jo’burg.

And there’s other evidence. Some time back Cape Town was hit by a spate of power failures – rolling blackouts, load shedding and spanner-in-the-works became familiar phrases to all of us, thanks to the ongoing smarmy delight of Johannesburg-based comedians, talk show hosts, columnists and opportunist cabinet ministers. Now the shoe is on the other foot, though, it’s not nearly so amusing. Now it is something that we need to be Concerned About.

And Concerned they are. I’m a big John Robbie fan but when he bangs on about the blackouts and the severity of the situation I want to knee him in the nuts and say “There -– now you know what we’ve been going through”. And then to run for my life.

To make ourselves feel better, Capetonians sent Gautengers Madame Zingara’s. It’s a revolutionary concept that involves erecting a tent and poncing about the inside of it in silly hats before emptying your wallet at the feet of the gifted entrepreneur who conceptualised the whole thing. It’s a rip-off, the food is decidedly average, the entertainment contrived and amateurish, and the staff annoying. Gautengers love it. Which just goes to show.

The typhoon scare last week also contained a lesson. It might be one as simple as “don’t believe every email you receive” or even “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’ll taste better with a touch of orange”. In case you live somewhere else, let me explain. Some dolt sent an email off warning his mates that there was severe weather on the way. Those mates sent it off to a few others and before you could yell “Hey, has anyone got Simon Gear’s cell number?” the highways were jammed, offices vacated and everyone scattered in the general direction of home. Why it matters where you are when a typhoon hits I’m not entirely sure. Death is death. And unless your home is filled with Turkish belly-dancers and U2 has rocked up for a private performance, you’re more likely to fulfil your dying fantasy in the office. Unless the hottie from Accounts has also ducked early in which case it’s just you and the Internet. Again.

All of this leads me to the inescapable conclusion that Gautengers are wussies. Or are more wily than we give them credit for. Wily wussies or not, they still scored a half-day so you have to give them some credit. But pity the poor bugger who, thinking death was imminent, SMS’d his girlfriend and confessed to having it off with her best friend. He wanted to purge his conscience to guarantee an audience at the pearly gates and instead returned home to find his life, and wardrobe, in tatters on the front lawn. C’mon — you know it could have happened.

And then there’s Melville.

Stay in Cape Town long enough and you’ll begin to believe that black people either don’t live there, or they still think there’s some kind of State of Emergency curfew. And no-one has bothered to let them know it’s been lifted because, well, Capetonians seem to like it this way. Apart from a couple of pubs and clubs in Long Street, Cape Town’s nightlife looks like that famous photograph Study of Snow and Dandruff. A couple of years back I accompanied a scout for a global celebrity chef who was looking at opening a restaurant in South Africa. We walked around Cape Town a bit, and then went up to Johannesburg and strolled (briskly) through the Newtown precinct.

“So where are you going to open it?” I asked at the end of the trip

“Johannesburg”

“Why not Cape Town?”

“Because we don’t want to just have black people in the kitchen and white people out front,” came the trite but uncomfortably accurate response.

Melville is one of those places where the uninhibited, cosy delight of the New South Africa is on full display.

There are two Melville crowds — pre-rush and post-rush. Stroll up Seventh Avenue in the early evening before ADT has phoned its clients with the all-clear to hit the streets, and you’ll be stopped every two steps by eager staff urging you to come on in. Compare that to a walk along Camps Bay’s beachfront, where you are glared at if you interrupt Madame Waitron’s cellphone call to her agent by daring to look in her restaurant’s direction. Post-rush is a different story. The anti-smoking laws get thrown out the window (hell, back home the only people who throw anything smoking-related out the window are British tourists). Everyone smokes everywhere. Fine for me, not great for those who would rather not peel an ashtray off their clothes at the end of an evening. And then the music gets cranked up making independent thought, let alone conversation, virtually impossible. I think that’s why everyone in Johannesburg is on drugs. It’s because you have to retreat inside yourself to hold an intelligent conversation, and drugs make it seem more normal.

My mate and I ended up at one of the few places where conversation was about hearing not lip-reading. It was a bar that caters largely to the gay market with one of those brightly coloured flags out front and waves of scented moisturiser wafting through the open front door. Filled with friendly, pleasant-smelling eye-candy it was great for my gay mate. And I could smoke inside, so we were both happy.

The thing with Melville is that people try and sell you stuff. If you let your guard down you’ll leave with armloads of genuine Nigerian wire art that you probably don’t want.

Someone tried to sell us a rainbow flag, and even the barman tried to hustle us for an aeroplane sculpture he’d constructed using straws and toothpicks. Someone has clearly over-funded the “Arts & Crafts For Everyone” NGO. Why can’t bar staff just be out of work actors and stand around pouting like the ones in Cape Town?

Apart from the crafty craftsmen, there are the gangsta car guards including, bizarrely the one with no legs in Seventh Avenue. Um … is it just me or is a car guard without legs a bit like hiring a deaf call centre agent or a lobotomised talk show host (oh dear, there’s another Tom London reference)? I’m all for equal opportunity and giving those who were previously disadvantaged a, um, leg up, but this seems to be stretching it a bit. Because he can only watch the cars as they get broken into and driven away, he isn’t much use to anyone except when it comes to the identity parade part of the chain of justice. So he earns his keep in the meantime by sitting on the pavement ranting and evangelising. He’s Melville’s own Thought Leader — a seemingly profitable business. Apparently he can score up to R1 300 a day.

Despite the madness of piles, Tom London, blackouts, typhoons and Madame Zingara’s, Johannesburg still has a lot going for it. It’s the only city in the country where you can hear John Perlman on the radio, where the Sunday Times comes out on a Saturday, and where its residents actually talk to each other. Even if its just a ranting car guard on the fast track to a holiday house in Llandudno.

So given that he is one of my comic heroes, I was devastated to read of his conviction recently of downloading child porn, and his sentencing to ten months in prison. Some commentators are outraged at the leniency of the sentence, and they may be right. I can’t think about that right now. I can only wonder if I’ll ever again be able to watch any of his side-splitting comedy, carefully stored on my PVR or in my DVD collection. I suspect not. And I’m not alone, I see. Bruce Dessau raised similar questions on his This is London blog.

Now he’s been found guilty, he’s been sentenced and will spend ten months in jail (well, only five but a jail sentence nonetheless).

This is probably the end of his comic career, which is in itself a tragedy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning his actions. The fact is that the passive act of downloading child porn is not a victimless crime — some child was abused or drugged or somehow coerced into posing for the video or photographs. And by purchasing it (which he did) Langham was part of creating a demand for the material that would make the monsters who made it go out and make some more, screwing up some other child’s life. Sympathy for the child obviously outweighs anything else. But I also feel sorry for Langham, as someone who is clearly in the grips of a disease that no intelligent human would wish upon themselves, and so it’s safe to say is probably out of his control. He maintains he was abused as a child — which may or may not be true and it may or may not explain his paedophiliac nature, without excusing it. I’m not a psychologist so I don’t want to get into a debate on the correlation between the abused child and abusing adult. But I have some sympathy for someone in that position.

And then there’s another debate, put very eloquently by David Aaronovitch in this article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2003. He raises some pretty interesting points….better than I could, so let me quote him:

“No matter how often I turn this one round in my head, I cannot quite accept that thinking is the same as doing. I just don’t agree that looking at child porn on the net is a similar order of crime to creating the abuse and then photographing it, or even to distributing it.

[..]

That’s because there’s something else here too. The advent of the internet and the ubiquity of computers have shortened the distance between fantasy and its expression. This is a very dramatic change. It’s not just about being able to access pictures and stories that once were the territory only of seedy sex-shops (though that’s part of it), or even the realisation that there are people out there who are as weird as you may be. It is the ability, in the most unrestricted way, to explore simultaneously the inner and the outer world.

It is easy to see that this search can be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release. Some ‘perversions’ such as shoe fetishism have always existed and are relatively straightforward, but others are not. These, however, are now imaginable and available. It surely can only be in the age of the web that you could look up the phrase ‘goat-fisting’ and get 81 references. And if you follow them up, are you a goat-fister? I believe that some of those who have sent their credit card details off to child-porn providers have simply lost sight of themselves and of reality, and are actually no more likely to abuse children than any of the rest of us. “

It’s an interesting argument for treating consumers of child pornography differently from the creators of it. In the same way that heroin users might get a more lenient sentence than those who transport and sell large quantities of it. It might be more lenient, but it would still be a sentence. And, when it comes to the purchasing of child pornography, I suspect you’d have a hard time debunking the supply/demand argument. At best you are an accessory to a crime, and that deserves some sort of punishment.

For my own selfish reasons, this all got me thinking about comedy and context. I have no idea about John Cleese’s private life, but I think he’s hilarious. I enjoy Corne and Twakkie more than a vaguely intelligent adult should, without stopping for a second and wondering what they do offstage. For them, the world they create on screen or on stage is enough context for me to relax and enjoy their craft. That used to be the case with Chris Langham, but now his private actions dominate his public persona to the point where it is unlikely one can separate the two. Now that I know that he sits in the glow of his computer screen late at night getting off to images of abused children, I’m not sure I can raise a smile at anything he does on screen. He’s a comedian, dammit, someone who trades in the currency of making people laugh. That doesn’t square up with his nocturnal browsings. Would I feel differently if he were a painter I admired? Or a sculptor or wildlife photographer? Victorian fairy artist Richard Dadd was a murderer. Does that knowledge affect our enjoyment of his work? How about Janet Jackson’s penchant for flashing her nipple? And don’t get me started on her brother….

Look, we all have slight deviances. I, for example, am particularly partial to a gentle nuzzling and licking of my inner right thigh (left if you’re kneeling in front of me). Fortunately that’s not illegal, it doesn’t hurt anyone else, and if I wanted to spend my time and money on a subscription to thighguzzlers.com then I could without worrying about the consequences of getting caught. Apart from a few sideways looks in the gym changing room, but then I’m used to those. And you could quite comfortably read my blog and find it interesting/entertaining/insightful or anything else knowing about my little fetish. In that case, apart from thinking me slightly odd, you probably could quite easily separate out the private knowledge from my public work. What Langham has done, though, is generally viewed as so repulsive by most normal adults that such separation is impossible. And that’s why his career is over. And, apart from my sympathy for the victims of his crime, I have a selfish sympathy for myself and for lovers of great comedy that we’re going to be deprived of his talents in the future, and that his past body of work is now probably unwatchable.

It is inspired. Find the places where kids hang out. Put up a couple of loudspeakers. Play Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits Gold Collection on repeat and, before you can say “Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl,” the kids will have sulked off to the next corner.

There’s another part of the plan and that is to install devices that emit a high-pitched, mosquito-like buzzing noise that, apparently, teenagers find distasteful (clearly whoever invented that had never heard of Britney Spears). But it all seems to be working — authorities report that the implementation has led to a 24% drop in anti-social behaviour. That is, of course, assuming that one doesn’t categorise the playing of Barry Manilow really loudly as anti-social behaviour. Which I believe you should. But no one asked me.

This scheme is child-management gold. But I wonder if it would work here in South Africa?

You could try to put up the speakers around popular shopping malls, but chances are they’d either be stolen in seconds or some bright spark would hack in and replace the blonde, big-nosed one with Fokofpolisiekar (in my opinion a vast improvement anyway). But there is another possible application.

Housebreakings are a common problem in the suburbs of Cape Town and Johannesburg. Why not apply the Manilow method to chase people off our manicured lawns? Every night, before you go to bed, lock up the dogs and play the sweet sounds of Bazza to the night creatures in your garden. No self-respecting tsotsi would be seen dead trying to get into your house. And even if they did, chances are they would leave clutching only a handful of fluffy pink trinkets and the Noot vir Noot box set. You could take it a step further and rewire your home alarm system so that instead of a shrill siren when your privacy is invaded, your neighbours are alerted by Manilow crooning, “Well, you came and you gave without taking, but I sent you away, oh Mandy …”

I’m not sure how effective the Manilow method is in the UK. I suspect that it simply shifts the problem from one street corner to the next. The only way to stop it altogether would be to plant a small iPod Nano with a Wi-Fi connection in every teenager’s brain and operate it remotely using an iTunes playlist devised by the Shady Acres Home for the Frail. Or you could simply stream them Snuki Zikalala reading the latest SABC Radio News bulletins (although that may be crossing some sort of line and be classed as child abuse). Either way you would be able to torment teens wherever they are, from wherever you are. Job done.