Feature
Saturday night fever
by Alistair Bone
The strange case of Dr Edwards and Mr Hide, and the chat show that isn’t current affairs, but might be art.
Rodney Hide is a roly-poly little barracuda, the joker in the Act pack. Halfway through his appearance on Edwards at Large he is running down a printed page of questions for a stony-faced Brian Edwards to answer. He should get his own show.
Hide is asking Edwards about whether it is a good thing for Edwards to be paid as a media trainer for the Labour Party while running a current-affairs show. Edwards says he isn’t running a current-affairs show. Hide says he is. And furthermore, Edwards’s wife is on the New Zealand On Air board that has forked out $190,000 of taxpayers’ money to make it.
So …? Edwards says. A nice move. Hide can say what he likes in Parliament, but out here he can be sued. He plays a careful straight bat to the spinner and knocks the shot gently back to the bowler’s feet. He looks a bit pathetic. The wily old dog Edwards gets points for guile. The game ends in a draw.
This segment of Edwards at Large has possibly been the best, most innovative TV of the year. Consider the situation: two gnarled gladiators confronting each other in a strange fourth dimension of television. Hide’s presence on the show immediately supports a claim that it is current affairs at the same time as he argues that point. The interviewer is a subject within a subject, the guest becomes interrogator and hyper-realist – continually referring to the rugby test running on another channel, reinforcing the dadaist impression of two men acting on a stage without an audience.
Edwards, one-time scourge of politicians and teller of truths, turns to the law of defamation to silence a critic on his own show. Hide bags the show as a taxpayer rip-off, but his presence and the brave decision to invite him on have led to a wonderful and bizarre spectacle that validates the show’s existence. Really, it isn’t a current affairs or a lifestyle programme, it’s pure experimental art.
Some facts of the matter are easy: Edwards is a media adviser to government, his wife is on the board of NZOA, she declared a conflict of interest when his show was being considered for a grant and abstained from voting. He is running a lifestyle programme, according to him, so there is no conflict of interest with the day job. Over on TV3, the inoffensive Home Truths is picking up $60,000 from NZOA next time out, even though it is fronted by the PM-baiting John Campbell.
Then things get a bit more interesting. “With occasional exceptions, we don’t fund sport or current affairs,” says NZOA chief executive Jo Tyndall, “because generally speaking they are commercially viable or delivered without the need for public subsidies. There is a difference between a current-affairs show and the Edwards show that was presented to us as falling within our arts and performance genre.”
So a talkshow is not current affairs as long as it stays off politics? “Yes.”
NZOA can’t get the money back if the show is awful or for many other reasons. As long as it is made and goes to air, the contract is fulfilled. So far so ordinary. But a subsequent conversation with Hide rapidly spins into something less so.
Listener: “You think it [Edwards’s show] shouldn’t have funding under New Zealand On Air guidelines?”
Hide: “Well … Aren’t they supposed to fund current affairs?”
Listener: “They say [current affairs] is commercially viable, so it doesn’t need funding.”
Hide: “I didn’t know that. I just knew that Brian Edwards was saying it wasn’t current affairs and that was why he didn’t have a conflict of interest. I didn’t know it was a New Zealand On Air requirement.”
Listener: “Oh.”
Hide: “You have got me very interested. If they have a rule that says they can’t fund current affairs, then I am going to look at making a complaint to the Auditor-General’s office. From the Auditor-General’s perspective, the criteria have to be matched. If New Zealand On Air have funded a current-affairs show, then the Auditor-General would not approve.”
Listener: “Even if it is an informal in-house rule?”
Hide: “Yes.”
The interviewer is happily interviewing the interviewer’s interviewer when he is suddenly reborn, chrysalis-like, into Act Party researcher. Hide is clearly an avant-garde performance artist of the highest order, a national treasure. Sell the ballet and the orchestras, burn the McCahons. Forget Edwards, give this man his own gig. Our bill’s in the mail, mate.
Edwards at Large, TV1, Saturday, 9.30pm.
