O Tal Canal

I watched this evening on DVD, O Tal Canal, that revolutionary comedy programme of early Portuguese TV. The year was 1983, and I was 12 going on 13. No one had ever seen something like that on TV in Portugal. It was hilarious, nonsensical, challenging, a total riot! Could we actually manage to be that funny, so intelligently funny? So modern?

Watching it this evening for the first time after more than 25 years, I realised - with emotion - that Herman José, the creator and main actor of O Tal Canal, was my first teacher in the art of Camp. And that was lifesaving. It brought me a lot of sanity. It was a most needed vehicle to express so much of my own difference, in tragedy and in comedy. Still today, my inspiration for Camp comes from Marilú (the simple servant girl who was a man after all), Filipa from Cozinho para o Povo (the posh female Chef who, still today, brings me down with laughter), Tony Silva (the cheesy super-star of the Americas), and all the other dozens of fantastic characters that he and his team were able to bring to life.

And what would life be like without Camp? High Camp à la portugaise? Oh, life without it would be ever so boring. Goodness gracious!

I don't have a lot of sympathy for the man behind the actor - his personal and political views do not fit with my own - but chapeau to him for all the fresh air, indeed the storm, the tornado, that his comedy acting represented in Portugal throughout the 1980's and still much of the 1990's. You know the caliber of an actor, when so many of the expressions he made popular in his programmes have become part of my generation's own jargon.

With O Tal Canal colour TV became real!