TV Review
Quick, no one’s watching
by Diana Wichtel
TVNZ is screening two very pleasing home-grown shows. Who would know?
From our state broadcaster’s website comes this humorous pronouncement: “TVNZ’s role is to reflect and explore what it means to be a New Zealander … this unique and special responsibility means quality television that educates, informs and entertains through local home-grown programming …”
I’ve been reflecting on what it means to be a New Zealander as I explore the schedules for local, home-grown shows (both!) buried by responsible programmers in unique and special time slots.
In other words, The Book Show is back, showing at an off-putting 9.30am on Saturday. It makes you think with nostalgia of the pre-news spot it had last time around. What matter that the new series was beginning when a book by a New Zealand author (Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip) was up for the Man Booker Prize?
Still, The Book Show is worth seeking out. The slightly rushed pace of the first series has been fine-tuned. The whole thing is less breathless and the first episode was very good. I’m not just saying that because the book discussed was former Listener writer Steve Braunias’s lovely How to Watch a Bird. Former Listener editor Finlay Macdonald does the show’s amiably searching interview segment with a writer each week. As one is reminded whenever the All Blacks tank or you find yourself reviewing your mates, this is a small country.
It’s a small set, too. One that still resembles an explosion in an op shop. This is not a bad thing. Literary types look quite well turned-out by comparison with the surrounding shambles. The set also has a resident rat. His name, according to the credits, is Wombat. He could be seen at the end of the first show nibbling away at a copy of Gunter Grass’s The Rat. Some sort of postmodern comment on New Zealand’s place in the history of Western literature, perhaps.
The panel seems more relaxed, this time around. Sometimes a little too relaxed. There was the time they were discussing a character in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. “It’s totally legitimate, this sense of horror she has at the sex act,” said the Dominion Post’s Guy Somerset of a character. “Is it?” demanded host Emily Perkins. “You’ve not been in my bedroom,” observed Somerset, taking the opportunity to practise his conversation stoppers.
The show has been criticised for being too kind to the books discussed. Certainly everyone had nice things to say about How to Watch a Bird. “That poor woman from Nelson who was into birds and everyone used to say ‘Show us your tits’,” recalled Marcus Lush fondly.
But if the panel segment lacks punch, it’s probably not a matter of timidity. Kath Akuhata-Brown took issue with parts of How to Watch a Bird. “His references to Maori treatment of birds and such – I didn’t think it was fair.” The panel were ready to climb into this, but there just wasn’t time.
Still, few shows provide so much value for money in a commercial half-hour. The chats with Rachael King (The Sound of Butterflies) and Neil Cross (Heartland) made you recall what a television interview can be like when they’re more Parkinson, less Sainsbury. Viewers with Freeview – all five of us – can catch the first series on Sundays at 9.00pm.
Good on Eating Media Lunch for surviving since 2003 as the scourge of our increasingly beyond-satire public life. Once again the programmers demonstrate their unerring instincts by putting it on at 10.00pm on a Friday, thus saving the target audience the bother of having to watch it. Paul Holmes dancing, sex with chickens, the unholy glee of the media David Bain-anza – the first episode deftly invoked the worst horrors of the shocking year so far. It may be a bit harsh to call Michael Laws “the appalling, prancing rodent”, though the clip of him dancing made a fair case.
Then there was the chicken porn. I guess they have to keep upping the shock ante. But the show is at its most dangerous when it uses real footage. The priceless John Key video blog clips – “Hi there! I’m back in Parliament!”; “Hi! Well, it’s Monday!” – tell you more about the guy than a dozen earnest interviews do. If an Eating Media Lunch election special isn’t in the works, it needs to be.
Of course the show is mostly about the media. In that first episode they couldn’t resist replaying last year’s footage – it was a compelling moment in the history of New Zealand television – of Brendan Pongia having an unfortunate attack of gas on Good Morning. The clip has assumed a certain symbolic significance. Breaking wind on national television – quite a bit of what we see in primetime these days amounts to little more.
