Rant Boy was exhausted by his week in Jo'burg, a city which really compromises the life of the liver. (The crime is tricky, agreed - but it's the barmen that are lethal.) The week was especially taxing following hard on the heels of Oppikoppi, where Rant Boy spent 24 hours in a sleepless campaign to alert revelers to the dangers of drug abuse. ("Drugs can kill you! Don't try and build a bonfire when you're pissed!" he could be heard yelling to a selection of mud-escutcheoned dutchmen.) So a quiet Sunday at home was a bonus - especially when you throw in an all-too rare chance to watch Carte Blanche.

Rant Boy loves Carte Blanche. It's a glorious satirical bow to classic Seventies South African news magazines - complete with two white presenters and carefully monitored proportions of the two "official" languages. Hell, it's even called "White Menu" in French - how un-PC is that? (Question: given the number of our West African kinfolk now pursuing the Amakwerican Dream on our rainbow pavements and at our unreconstructed traffic lights - still only the same three colours, and no blacks at the top - to which Renaissance does French belong - noble and African, or exploitative and Eurocentric?)

Of course, the show is much freer than a typical Botha-era news magazine. In those days, any show boasting "You have the right to see it all" would have been laughed off the screen, or banned as subversive. In the brave new Nineties, "You have the right to see it all" comes with the unspoken rider, "especially if it's a penis".

What is this Carte Blanche obsession with dicks? At one point last year, it was like they were introducing a "dick of the week" section - they had severed dicks, enlarged dicks, transgendered dicks (installation), transgendered dicks (removal), impotent dicks, infected dicks and Ian Woodall. Rant Boy's convinced that Ruda and Derek have shown more dick on television than Jeff Stryker.

This week's dickumentary was a gruesome account of the local practice of kidnapping young men, circumcising them, and demanding a ransom from their families. (A startlingly ingenious way of marketing that ol' time religion - Rant Boy retracts everything he's ever said about the Catholic Church. At least all they ever use is gold and guilt.)

This particular form of child abuse, the perpetrators assert, is an important part of their culture. Rant Boy has a message for them - fucking evolve, OK? (He wishes the obstetrician who delivered him had.) It's part of the body, it's supposed to be there, and it's very sensitive for a reason; so put down the flint axe, granddad, it's the Nineties - we have soap, water, condoms and insecticide. We can manage the hygiene without mutilation.

Ruda put her foot in it, too. She's interviewing a father of a kid who's died through this traditional barbarism, a father who had to beat a confession out of the killers, and she goes all constitutional on him: "Do you think you had the right to take the law into your own hands?" Wake up, Ruda! These people are kidnapping teenagers and then cutting the ends of their dicks off! Somebody has to stop them, and it won't be the police.

The police don't have the resources - or the time. Every 26 seconds they have another rapist to catch - a rapist, shrinks tell us, who achieves sexual pleasure through violence and power, who equates pain and pleasure, and who may be insecure in a normal, consensual sexual encounter because of a castration complex.

Or maybe, he just hates his grandpa for dragging him into the bush and slicing the end of his dick off in the name of religion, culture and cash

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