TV review
Not Happen Inn
by Diana Wichtel
THANKS TO A BIG NIGHT OUT and a small senior moment with my VCR, I missed the first episode of The Big Night In. Still, this gave me plenty of time to absorb, like a dose of nuclear fallout, initial reaction to the show.
Oh dear. Clearly, I’d missed a historic occasion. A disaster of this magnitude is one of those defining moments in local television. Where were you when TVNZ managed to do for television light ent what Melody Rules did for the sitcom?
TVNZ valiantly sent me a tape, but even that went wrong. The first part of the show appeared, prophetically, as a wall of migraine-like interference. I began to think TBNI was labouring, like the Bard’s Scottish play, under some sort of ancient curse. What unfolded when the tape started working was certainly ancient. “Now let’s meet a man who for most of the 70s was the face of pop,” enthused our host, Pio Terei, a man who’s been the face of many a kamikaze attempt at local comedy over the years. “Yesterday Was Just the Beginning” indeed.
In the name of banter, Pio quizzed Mark Williams – “Mate, you ran off. You had to go” – about his move long ago to Australia. “I had to,” agreed Williams. “It was a great time, the 70s, but there wasn’t a lot more you could do.” On that depressing note, it was on to the Fondue Set – “Cheesy by name, but not by nature!” linked Pio desperately.
The show lurched from the Topp Twins being serious – always a daunting prospect – to the Topp Twins flogging their book. What was in the book? wondered Pio, who was by now getting better at trying to look interested. “Everything,” promised a Topp. “Little bit of Jools and me, all the characters in there. Mum and Dad in there. Recipes …” Clearly, the book shared the organisational principles of The Big Night In.
And so it went rather gruellingly on – “Mark Williams is back, showing no mercy!”
There was nothing wrong with the talent. We’ve got bags of it in this country and it’s often had nowhere to go but Australia. Who could blame them for taking the opportunity? But most looked as uncomfortable as Suzanne Prentice doing a duet with Pio while awkwardly half-perched on a too-high stool.
The set doesn’t help. It’s flashy enough, but oddly cold and heartless. The musicians toil away on isolated stages. On the second show, Frankie Stevens sang on one while the backing girls did their bit on another. It was as if they were all avoiding some sort of contagion. Live ent in the age of SARS.
There was a phantom live audience, who might have been enjoying themselves, but we never got a chance to see.
As for the line-up, for all the flashes of world-class talent and random nostalgia cult moments, it was astonishingly conservative. Che-Fu was considered borderline for the audience, it’s been reported, and wholesome hip-hoppers Nesian Mystik were considered too radical.
What? Don’t the TVNZers involved watch their own commercial breaks? These are the musicians who are flogging things between programmes, presumably to an audience who would appreciate seeing them on a local music show.
Mad. Still, I have moved on from anger and denial to a certain degree of acceptance. Looking on the bright side, The Big Night In could just turn out to be an important cultural artefact. The rage that the show has excited in some quarters – Dave Dobbyn went memorably ballistic – suggests that some sort of national nerve has been touched.
In fact, you could see TBNI as the defining local music show of the century. Unfortunately, that’s last century. As with TBNI, our evolving music industry is still immature and struggling, but at least it’s on the move into new and exciting territory. The least a television music show should do is to reflect that.
Even the set is somehow emblematic. Lonesome singers stranded, as the title of that seminal work of New Zealand rock history put it, in paradise (or possibly purgatory, depending on how you respond to Pio’s jokes). As if to underline the symbolism, a running gag in the second show had Pio stranded up a tower, ignored and with no visible means of escape.
The shambles that is The Big Night In perfectly reflects TVNZ’s currently chaotic state. The effort to dodge blame for the show has seen everyone flailing about like, well, Headless Chickens.
As for the talent, could there be a coded message to the state broadcaster in some of the song choices? We’ve had Pio and Suzanne Prentice’s incredulous “Did You Ever?”, a superbly clueless “I Don’t Know” from Jordan Luck and exhortations from the Velox Brothers to “Straighten Up and Fly Right”.
Too late for that, I fear. By the end of the second show, Pio was sounding fatalistic about the whole thing. “Wherever you go,” he signed off pointlessly, “there you are.” There’s a defiant meaninglessness about the whole exercise that could just see it go down in history as a Kiwi television classic.
