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vi | denis beckett<br />
The plan was we’d breeze through the final changes and<br />
wave a friendly farewell at lunchtime, whereupon Denis would<br />
slink away and gloat over his beautiful pages, I’d dash off to<br />
meet pals for a barbecue and beers while watching the soccer<br />
event of the year, the Mainstay cup final between Kaizer chiefs<br />
and Highlands Park, on TV, and typesetter Liz Khumalo would<br />
go shopping.<br />
Hah! Our plans slowly disintegrated as Denis agonised over<br />
every damn word of every piece of text in the magazine, nitpicking<br />
through more final page proofs than I’d seen before or<br />
since. Liz set corrections, rewrites of corrections, and corrections<br />
of rewrites of corrections, while I pasted column after column<br />
of the new type onto the layout grids.<br />
Lunchtime came and I still had hopes of dashing off to see the<br />
soccer. a couple of hours later, as kick-off loomed, the afternoon<br />
started to slip away; by half-time it became clear the only way<br />
I’d get to see a ball kicked was if I slashed Mr editor’s throat<br />
with my correction-blunted scalpel, leaving him bleeding over<br />
his flamboyant, but very fucking dignified, pages while I fled<br />
to the nearest TV set. I weighed up the possibilities and their<br />
consequences, sighed, accepted my fate and continued until<br />
late in the evening, unaware that I’d have the same murderous<br />
thoughts again and again and again . . .<br />
Denis and I worked together on frontline for 10 years,<br />
producing almost 100 issues, never agreeing on an interpretation<br />
of that dreadful, haunting, line, “flamboyant with dignity”. Our<br />
biggest arguments revolved around a basic clash of philosophies:<br />
I believed that if you’re selling a magazine on a newsstand, the<br />
reader has to be able to flick through the pages and find the<br />
cover stories quickly and easily. That means a decent projection<br />
of the main features. Denis believed a publication’s value lay in<br />
the quality and quantity of its text. He would have been happy<br />
to pack every edition with words, each story following from the<br />
previous with minimal space wasted on pictures or headlines.<br />
Our relationship was neatly summed up in his introduction
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