The memorial services from Christchurch and Gerard Smyth's When a City Falls.
TV
Filming during When a City Falls
ONE News (TV1, 8.00am) and 3 News (TV3, 8.00am). TV1 and TV3 cover the special service in Latimer Square, Christchurch, for the families of those lost in the earthquake one year ago today. Both networks also cross to Christchurch at noon for the Civic Memorial Service from Hagley Park. Wendy Petrie and Simon Dallow will be in Christchurch for the coverage, and Close Up’s Mark Sainsbury is also there. Click here for NZ Herald updates from Christchurch during the day.
When a City Falls (TV3, Wednesday, 7.30pm). Gerard Smyth had the supreme misfortune, among many, to have his film When a City Falls open in cinemas just before Christmas last year. Bad timing for a documentary that our reviewer described as the film the people of Christchurch, living through their hardest year, deserved. Smyth had been filming since September 2010 when the first earthquake struck Christchurch and had been about to put the finishing touches on a short film that was in part a celebration of the zero death toll of that first quake. But when the February 22 shock hit, “we had been usurped by a much bigger event”, he told Media 7 last year. Out of his damaged studio, he managed to retrieve a camera and a broken lens, and went outside to capture what he could. We are lucky he did, because whereas most of the media were shackled by heavy Cera restrictions, Smyth, whose house was in the red zone, was able to move around at street level filming first the chaos of the earthquake – the shocked, the worried, the desperate – and then later the community response as neighbours and neighbourhoods gathered and distributed food, water, and started the clean-up. Again. There is some footage of tears and trauma in When a City Falls, but Smyth has not made a grief-porn documentary. “Most of the film is about the response,” he told Media 7. “It’s really about kindness, about people coming together – that word ‘resilience’, I suppose. “We’re not used in New Zealand to seeing ourselves in difficult times, and here we are under fire. And I guess, [asking] who are we? What happens to us? Who do we become?”
SPCA Rescue (TV1, 8.00pm). We’d far rather see New Zealand SPCA officers rescuing cute kittehs and puppies, and here is a whole new series of good deeds out in the field. Tonight, three little lambs with a terrible disease, a dog with an untreated injury, and a chicken that strays. No one knows why.
Burn Notice (Four, 10.25pm). It is a source of frustration to TV week that Four has held on to this fun little series for so long. It’s like the programmers want us to download it or something. Finally, season three and ex-CIA agent Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is continuing to try to have his “burn notice” lifted. This means bad guys, schemes, spycraft and shoot-’em-ups, and Michael is aided and abetted by ex-girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar) and his buddy Sam Axe (geek favourite Bruce Campbell).
RADIO
Appointment (Radio New Zealand Concert, 7.00pm). With our very own Bret McKenzie nominated for a best song Oscar this year for Man or Muppet? it’s high time someone looked at the musical side of the film industry’s most prestigious awards ceremony. And that person is Steve Danby, with May I Heave the Envelope, Please?, broadcasting from the Lido Theatre in Wellington. Here, he comes to the outraged conclusion that the judges are “all STARK RAVING BONKERS”, given how many great popular songs have missed out on a gong – if they were nominated at all. – Diana Balham