The pinfall wizards

If you subscribe to DStv, you can watch at least 13 different soapies in any given week.

The “soapie”, this overused word, as vapid and asinine as the stuff it describes, has created a Las Vegas-type culture in the desert-minds too whacked out after a day of shopping, washing, dusting, picking up the kids or whatever to take any more of the real world. Soapies have, are and always will be television’s version of what Shoeless Joe Jackson said in Field of Dreams: “If you build it, he will come.”

If you show it, they will watch.

Back at school in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies or whenever, you must have had to write an essay (opstel, moqoqo, tlhamo, isincoko or indaba elotshiweyo) about what you thought the future would look like. I was spot-on in 1964 with machines where you could get money and buy things, but way off with the flying suits we would all wear. I had quite an imagination.

But never in my wackiest whimsical flights of fancy would I have imagined a sub-culture would develop around something called a “soap opera”. Never-ending stories with plots as threadbare as a hobo’s pyjamas, actors who would lack depth or character even if you had popped a hundred caps of acid, and cinematography as meaningless as the great sayings of George W Bush.

I confess I once watched an episode of Dallas and one of Egoli (for purely professional reasons, you see) and once in England my mother, bless her abusive soul, asked me to bring her a tissue because something on Coronation Street had made her cry.

If you wanted the secret of eternal youth kept secret, I’m your guy — as long as they don’t strap me in a chair and show Muvhango, Binnelanders or Scandal. Then I’ll sing like an ADHD canary — anything to escape.

But despite this genetic aversion, I have discovered a soapie I can watch. And I watch it at every possible opportunity day or night or in between. It is the greatest soapie in the world.

It is “professional wrestling”.

Nothing holds an altar server’s taper or an empty Bic lighter to any of the current three paragons of cinematic perfection — TNA, ECW or WWE.

Week after week there are plots of unparallelled complexity, characters able to catapult profundity (and themselves) to hitherto unimagined heights, and acting as flawless as the crown jewels.

Here are true “shape-shifters”, real blood, choreography to dazzle Fontayne, daring real stunts that defy Pixar or the next 30 years of CGI, and absolutely credible, compelling, sublime scripting.

No other soapie, from Coronation Street to Falcon Crest, has its characters immortalised as action figures at Toys R Us. You cannot play the latest XBox version of 7de Laan and you don’t cram 50 000 fans, fireworks and frenzied trailer-trash into a studio to watch the filming of Days of Our Lives.

When Batista, Kane and his real-life brother the Undertaker square off in the squared ring against Triple H, Ray Mysterio and Umaga, the air hisses and crackles with the electric suspense of unpredictability.

To the graceful elegance of “Sweet Chin Music”, when executed by the Heart-Break Kid Shawn Michaels to perfection, despite teetering on the precipice of exhaustion just moments earlier, you feel yourself transported to angelic realms.

When Batista unleashes “The Animal” inside himself, it is orgasmic. How the Phenomenal AJ Stiles manages to recover from a beating that would reshape most coastlines is truly majestic. When the human Himalaya, the Great Kali, a planet-sized individual from the Punjab who stands almost 3m tall and has hands the size of your TV set, renders an eloquent soliloquy, the earth moves.

Hyperbole turns to euphemism in describing the transcendent glory of Smackdown, or Raw, or a cage match, or a no-disqualification street-fight falls-count-anywhere rumble. This is just so … so real!

And interlaced with the in-ring perfection are the vicious subtleties of human drama. The screwings of the Ewings are little more than innocent dalliances compared with the skullduggery of the MacMahons. The feeble reaching toward prettiness in The Bold and the Beautiful is quite pitiful compared with the WWE Divas — with real breasts and who can also kick some ass to boot.

Where lesser foolishness such as Passions or Isidingo resembles nursery-school nativity nonsense with trite props, the greatest snowjob on Earth uses real things such as folding chairs, tables, baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, ladders and bags of thumbtacks as weapons.

So the next time you feel that dirty little tug towards the remote handjob around soapie time, tell yourself you deserve better. Destiny beckons you to the WWE or TNA with its super-advanced six-sided ring and the Man-Beast Rhyno. Don’t waste yourself on people called Brock when you can have The Rock.

You owe it to yourself to glimpse Eden and the pinfall wizards.