TV review
Trivial pursuits
by Diana Wichtel
You'll laugh, you'll cry. But will you be any the wiser? That’s the question one is forced to ask about much that passes for local television current affairs these days.
Assignment, the one place where the word “investigation” could be used with a straight face, is gone. In its old slot, TVNZ is currently celebrating its commitment to the charter by screening Mitre 10 Changing Rooms.
So we’re left with the galloping women’s magazinisation that’s occurring on shows such as Sunday, 60 Minutes and 20/20. There was the Sunday classic on bad boy Darren McDonald. Metaphors, like so many P-crazed celebrities, ran amok as we heard all the sordid details: “There he was, the TV3 newsreader and celebrity living it up in the fast lane. But then … the sky fell in!”; “I swallowed it and 10 minutes later I fell off a drag queen’s knee!”
McDonald, we heard, was living a double life. Cue arty, out-of-focus camera work as two Darrens walked pointlessly down a street. Yet there was apparently no time to speak to anyone with more of a perspective on the affair than Darren’s mum. Current affairs is supposed to be about putting events into some sort of context. About applying a little analysis. Isn’t it? Instead, increasingly it operates as a sort of soggy electronic encounter group.
Holmes has long been home to the tearful close-up. The show has been taken to task for its treatment of the story of John Jury, a moving tale of a tetraplegic whose 11-year-old grandson was allegedly forced to stay home from school to care for him. There was always a lot to that one, but it was left to the print media to tell the whole story.
Still, Holmes is unashamedly populist. And you have to admire a news show that responds in kind to a National MP driving a tractor up the steps of Parliament. Even if the entertainment value of watching Paul driving a tractor around the Network Centre, shouting “No more farting at TVNZ!”, is, at best, debatable.
But we can expect something more substantial from 60 Minutes. It’s not just the format. The imported items generally manage to be compelling without resorting to the simplistic coverage we often get from the local product.
Take the 60 Minutes item on Joel Hayward and his wretched thesis. The reporter was hardly probing. Nodding sympathetically is so much more telegenic. The item accepted Hayward entirely on his own terms as the victim of a merciless witch-hunt.
Hayward denied that his thesis denied the Holocaust. “What I did do was question some of the sources for the quantities and the rate of gassings,” said Hayward.
What the thesis actually said, among other bizarre conclusions, was that, “A careful and impartial investigation of the available evidence pertaining to Nazi gas chambers reveals that these apparently fall into the category of atrocity propaganda.”
If the reporter knew this, he wasn’t letting on. Neither did he investigate Hayward’s dramatic story of a bullet presented to him with a death threat by a total stranger. Again it was left to the print media (see last week’s Listener) to point out that the incident might not have happened as it was so breathlessly presented on 60 Minutes. “We spent a couple of days with him, and found him to be genuine and credible,” the show’s producer later explained to the Listener’s Philip Matthews.
It would be amusing if it wasn’t so insulting. It all comes down to a wilful underestimating of viewers’ intelligence. Clearly, we can’t be trusted with anything too complicated. Keep it simple and stupid, preferably with some tears.
The other night 20/20 presented the story of three women who unmasked the boyfriend of one of them as a wanted conman. It might have been a nice little item without all the extraneous jazzing up. So we got Darryl’s Angels, with the poor women required to run around striking bad Charlie’s Angels poses. The result was long on gimmickry, short on analysis.
Sunday made up a little for this cavalcade of drivel the other night, but then it’s hard to mess up a story about dolphins.
The piece on alleged New Zealand spy Ian Milner was good, too. But poor old Cameron Bennett was forced to present the show live from the Wallace Art Awards. It was a bit like the Holmes Christmas Special, only less high-brow. “Speech?” asked one award winner hopefully, as he collected his award. “No,” said Bob Harvey. Now back to the dolphins …
Meanwhile, Brian “This is not a current affairs show!” Edwards has upset Act MP Rodney “It is, too!” Hide and author Lynley Hood with some of the abrasive interviewing he said wouldn’t be featuring on his new show. So as current affairs becomes more like entertainment, entertainment shows become more like current affairs. I suppose it makes as much sense as anything in the wacky world of local television these days.
