A dominant theme will run through all the obituaries and tributes to Parekura Horomia – that he was a lovely man. It will be unnecessary to remind anyone who knew him of the injunction not to speak ill of the dead. The thought will simply not occur. He was a lovely man and little more needs to be said.
From time to time the lovely man was delivered by ‘the boss’ into Brian and Judy’s tender care for ‘media training’. Parekura was ‘expansive’ when he spoke to journalists or in the House. His expansiveness sometimes got him into trouble and our brief was to encourage him in the view that where journalists and the Opposition were concerned, less really was more.
We decided that our client needed to learn the dark art of starving his questioners of material to use against him by answering as many questions as possible with an undecorated ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. This did not come easily to Parekura who may well have thought it abrupt or rude and whose natural instinct was to convert a word into a sentence, the sentence into a paragraph and the paragraph into a full page. Where answering questions was concerned he was generous to a fault. Read the rest of this entry »
[Update: Susan Wood was admirably restrained in her interviews on Q & A a week after this post appeared.]
In the check-out line at Victoria Park New World this morning I bumped into my regular co-panellist on the media review segment of TV3’s The Nation, Bill Ralston. After comparing notes about why men enjoy supermarket shopping and women generally don’t, Bill asked me if I’d watched Q & A which follows the Sunday edition of The Nation on TV1 and is, I suppose, our competitor. No, I hadn’t watched it, but I’d be looking at it later on MySky. Bill thought I shouldn’t miss it. Susan Wood was ‘terrific’, she’d demolished David Shearer and given much the same treatment to National’s Nikki Kaye.
By coincidence, Bill and I had earlier been talking on The Nation to freelance journalist Karl Du Fresne who’d penned an article entitled ‘RNZ must right its lean to the left.’ Karl’s position was that there was strong evidence of endemic left wing bias by Radio New Zealand interviewers and he cited Kim Hill, Kathryn Ryan and Mary Wilson as examples.
I don’t agree with Karl’s thesis any more than I agreed with those who claimed right-wing bias on the part of the media when Helen Clark was running the country. Journalists have, in my view, an obligation to call to account whichever political party or coalition holds the reins of power, to be, if you like, an informal opposition.
Anyway, when I got home, I watched Susan Wood interviewing David Shearer and Nikki Kaye.
Once upon a time the term ‘current affairs’ had an unambiguous meaning. Current affairs programmes were essentially programmes about politics or issues with a strong political content. On shows like Compass and Gallery we talked to and about politicians and political issues. Compass was documentary in style, film rather than studio, not unlike TV1’s Sunday programme today; Gallery, on which I made my name as a ‘fearless interrogator’ of those in power – a novel concept in those days – had both studio and location items, but the live studio interview, primarily with politicians, was the programme’s trademark feature.
If you check out the backgrounds and ages of the people who complain that there are no ‘real current affairs programmes’ on TV anymore – people like me – you’ll probably find that they’re in their sixties or older and that they come from the school of ‘serious’ current affairs, which essentially means long studio interviews with politicians or lengthy studio debates between politicians. Being entertained was relevant to those viewers only insofar as the disembowelling of politicians was entertaining and new. Our early heroes were Robin Day and David Frost; today we bow down before HARDtalk’s Stephen Saccur and… I can’t think of anyone else.
‘Discursive’, a long word for ‘long’, is our preferred description of the sort of interviews we approve of, so that excludes Campbell Live, the late lamented Close Up and pretty well everything else masquerading (our word) as ‘current affairs’ on the telly.
‘Serious’ is our other favourite word which is why Seven Sharp does not and cannot qualify in our philosophy as a current affairs programme. Those people are having far too much fun. Giggling and current affairs are incompatible. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last couple of weeks Judy and I have received phone calls and an email from Cathy Barker. Cathy is the wife of former Spliz Enz drummer Michael Barker. Cathy and Michael are the parents of teenager Tristan Barker who has become infamous in Australia - where he has just finished school - and beyond for his anarchic and generally offensive rants on Facebook and Twitter.
According to Australian media reports, Tristan has ‘hundreds of thousands’ of teenage fans who hang on his every word. His Twitter page reveals that he currently has just under 15,000 followers, so I suspect his fan numbers may be exaggerated. But that’s still a lot of people and his on-line presence is undoubtedly significant.
Tristan’s methodology, by his own telling, is to slaughter as many sacred cows and offend the sensibilities of as many people as possible in order to make us all think. He is clearly highly intelligent and writes well.
But his outpourings are properly unacceptable, I would have thought, to even the most liberal mind. Here in New Zealand, Netsafe Executive Director Martin Cocker has described Tristan’s actions as ‘inciting of acts of hatred’. Whether that is Tristan’s intention or not, I think Cocker may well be right.
Unsurprisingly, Tristan who is a Kiwi and whose parents live in Rotorua, has attracted the particular attention of the Australian media, most recently for allegedly assaulting Channel Seven’s Today Tonight reporter Dave Eccleston who had travelled to Rotorua to interview him. Eccleston required medical treatment. Tristan appeared in Rotorua District Court this morning, charged with common assault. He was remanded on bail until April 3. Read the rest of this entry »
I got home rather late from dinner with friends tonight and tuned into TV3′ new hard-hitting current affairs show 3rd Degree. You’ve no doubt seen the preposterous promos for the show with Duncan Garner and Guyon Espener being the Batman and Robin of current affairs, fearlessly interrogating the bad guys. But their discomfort with the load of codswallop which they were compelled to front last night was as plain as the noses on their faces. Garner is brilliant and Espiner not quite as brilliant but together they should be a force for good. Instead they had the embarrassing task of having to appear enthusiastic about a disaffected car clamper and the beautiful but embarrassingly miscast Anna Guy. Good god, what an appalling waste of two of the most incisive political minds this country has ever seen. But hey, no doubt the execs at TV3 thought it would rate. And it just might. But the cost to your reputation and the reputation of Garner and Espiner may just be too high a price to pay. What is it they say about putting lipstick on a pig? Let’s hope for better next week.
On the second of March 2012, I wrote a post entitled ‘Our kids buy a car on Trade Me and get ripped off in a big way.’ That story came to its conclusion three days ago, on the second of March 2012, exactly one year later. To understand what has gone on in that year, I’m afraid you’ll have to read the original post first. But it’s an instructive story that may serve as a warning to others.
First the dramatis personae (the cast):
*Jon Horvath, the original owner of the car, who sold it to Erkan, with $7,000 odd owing to the finance company, Debt Works, some of it presumably in penalty fees.
*Erkan turned out to be Erkan Kilic. Mr Kilic comes from Turkey. He was, he would later claim, selling the car on behalf of one of his countrymen, whose name was Onur Ozbal.
*Onur Ozbal, the actual owner of the car, then living in Australia.
*Anil Ozbal, Onur’s brother. It was Anil whom Quentin met when he went to uplift the car and hand over his $3,700. Anil handed him a scrap of paper with the car details, price and Onur’s name on it. Anil then signed Onur’s name on the paper which Quentin took away as a receipt.
The car was repossessed roughly six months later. Of the four options which Quentin and Livy then faced to get the car or their money back, they opted to take a case to the Disputes Tribunal, which we used to call the Small Claims Court. This wasn’t entirely straightforward since they weren’t entirely sure who ‘Erkan’ was and Trade Me wasn’t about to tell them without evidence that a crime had been committed. Read the rest of this entry »
[I think it's important that, if I get something wrong in a post, especially in a criticism of an individual or organisation, I should fix the mistake. In this post I surmised that the more than 400,000 average audience cited by TVNZ for its first three episodes of Agent Anna was a 'cume', that it included anyone who had watched the programme for more than 5 minutes during those three weeks. In a comment on the site, TVNZ's Drama and Comedy Commissioner Kathleen Andersen said that this was incorrect. She wrote: 'The 400k was the audience average in 5+ for each of the three episodes that had been to air. It was not the cume.' I accept that that is the case and that my surmise was incorrect. However, I stand by my assertion that TVNZ's claim that 1.2 million people 'tuned in' to the programme over those three weeks, which Kathleen Anderson concedes was a cume, is 'rather misleading' since it conveys to the ordinary reader, not familiar with ratings jargon, that this was the total number of people who 'watched' the programme, when in fact it was a headcount of anyone who literally 'tuned in' for 60 seconds (not even 5 minutes, as I suggested) or more during those three weeks. Given that the average audience for the show was more than 400,000 and the number of people who 'tuned in' for a minute or more over those three weeks was 1.2 million, the inevitable conclusion would seem to be that significantly more people 'tuned out' over that period than 'tuned in'. 400,000 is nonetheless a solid rating for the programme. I'm indebted to Nielsen Television Audience Measurement for their assistance in this.]
Years and years ago, in another life, I fronted a television commercial for the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. I don’t recall seeing the result on TV but I remember that I wasn’t very good. After numerous takes the director took me aside and said, ‘We’re having a bit of trouble with the accent, Brian. Viewers won’t know what you’re talking about.’
I was naturally affronted.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, it sounds as though we’re in the railway business.’
‘In the railway business! Is this a joke?’
‘Well, come and have a listen.’
I listened to the playback, but couldn’t hear anything unusual.’
‘Well Brian, you’re saying “Rail Estate Institute of New Zealand”, not “Real Estate Institute of New Zealand”’.
He was right. If you say ‘real’ with an Irish accent, it comes out ‘rail’.
Twenty takes later I’d got it right.
I can’t remember what I was paid for this gig, but it was a lot less than Kev got for flogging carpet.
Thanks to our gypsy lifestyle, Judy and I have had lots of dealings with real estate agents over the years, some brilliant, some dire. So we were quite interested to see how the profession would be portrayed on what the Herald has described as ‘TV One’s new hit comedy series Agent Anna’ starring Robyn Malcolm. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s been debate about the latest TV3 Reid Research poll. The poll, which was taken between February 12 and February 21, has National on 51.4%, Labour on 32.6% and the Greens on 11%. No other party reaches the 5% threshold.
In the ‘Preferred Prime Minister’ stakes John Key is on 41% with David Shearer on 10%.
Where the parties are concerned, the poll is out of step with recent TV1, Fairfax, Herald and Roy Morgan polls by between 2% and 7%. Commentators have also pointed out that in the last election all the major polls overstated National’s support by between 3% and 7%.
Given Labour’s and Phil Goff’s woeful results in that election, one might think it barely mattered.
But when you take into account the current level of unemployment, the Government’s abysmal handling of the Christchurch school amalgamations and closures, the Novopay debacle and the Prime Minister’s complicity in the shonkiest political deal I can remember since I’ve been in this country, National’s and its leader’s high ratings do seem somewhat strange.
But in one sense, the accuracy or lack of accuracy of the polls really is irrelevant. This is because the pollsters are objectively proved right or wrong only once every three years: after the election, when it’s too late for their influence on the outcome to be undone. Read the rest of this entry »
In 1983, with criminal defence lawyer Mike Bungay, I co-authored Bungay on Murder, a book about murder and murderers in New Zealand. I learnt a great deal about the topic from working with Mike, much of it surprising (he preferred women jurors to men in rape trials) and I’ve maintained my interest in murder cases ever since.
It was Mike’s view that in cases where an accused’s guilt could neither be proved not disproved, his (the vast majority of homicides are committed by men) attractiveness or lack of attractiveness in personality or appearance or both, could have a significant bearing on a jury’s decision.
I was reminded of this by the news that Mark Lundy has won the right to appeal to London’s Privy Council against his conviction for the murder of his wife and daughter. Lundy is an obese, highly unattractive man; his histrionic display of grief at his wife’s and daughter’s funeral was both pathetic and bizarre; he was a user of prostitutes. None of this would endear him to a jury.
On hearing the news that Lundy had won the right to appeal his conviction to the Privy Council, one Palmerston North citizen told the Manawatu Guardian, ‘I believe he did it. I drive down there (to Wellington) three times a month and if he did it at that speed, he must be a Formula One driver. But I still think he’s just a pig and needs to accept what he’s done.’
Imagine this guy on the Lundy jury. He says, ‘I believe he did it.’ That’s a guilty vote. Then he says his personal driving experience tells him that Lundy couldn’t possibly have made the critical Petone – Palmerston North – Petone trip in the time the Prosecution claimed. That’s a not guilty vote. Finally he opts for guilty because, ‘I still think he’s just a pig.’
Most of the time I try to be reasonable in my analysis of the the press, radio and television (which is my particular field of interest). I try to avoid dismissing other people’s work as rubbish or crap. I’ve had some bad reviews in my time and I know how it feels. Mostly people in this industry are doing their best.
So a day or so back on this site I wrote in praise of Seven Sharp. I said they were finally getting it right. It happened to be the same day that Campbell Live, for the first time since it came on air, won the 7pm slot.
And then there was last night, Thursday 14 February. I made my fourth attempt at spaghetti alla carbonara and finally got it right. So we had dinner and sat down late to watch Seven Sharp and later Campbell Live and, after that, maybe a movie. (Let us now give thanks for MySky.)
But I never got beyond Seven Sharp. Yes it was Valentine’s Day and you might be forgiven a little romantic frivolity, but, as JC has observed, this 22 minutes of air-time felt like an hour. And it was total and absolute, mindless, inane, gratuitous, viewer-insulting, indefensible crap. It was testament to the fact that, even with three talented presenters, the whole can be considerably less than the sum of its parts. With the best will in the world, it had no redeeming merit.
I’m not going to express a view for another month on whether Seven Sharp deserves to live or die. That’s partly to be fair to the programme and partly to avoid the embarrassment of saying one thing today and the exact opposite tomorrow. (Mainly the second part!)
If we are to believe the papers, the radio and television news, New Zealanders live in a perpetual state of outrage. The nation’s blood pressure is never less than 180 over 110, so outraged are we by the egregious sinning of our fellow man and woman, at home and abroad. Our outrage can be singular or plural. An individual may be outraged by a neighbour’s cat walking across his lawn and want to damn the breed. In response an entire community of cat-lovers, numbering millions, may declare themselves outraged at such a perfidious suggestion. Occasionally the entire nation is said to be outraged, most commonly by something said or done by an Australian. An under-arm ball comes to mind.
The connection between the seriousness of an action and the public outrage it occasions is tenuous at best. Where outrage is concerned, actions need no longer speak louder than words. Indeed, as sources of outrage, words seem to have surpassed actions altogether. Read the rest of this entry »
I am at this very moment preparing my invoice to send to Raewyn Rasch, the Executive Producer of Seven Sharp. You may recall that Raewyn wrote to me, unhappy with my early comments about her programme. Very early, come to think of it – a week before the programme even went to air. The omens, I’d said, weren’t looking good.
Well, they still weren’t looking good a week into the show and I wrote another fairly lengthy post saying what I thought was wrong and, by implication, needed fixing.
And then came last night, Tuesday. And Tuesday was different. Tuesday’s programme had a real edge to it, the very thing I’d said was missing from the earlier shows. The banter was sharper, more Paul Henry and less Play School. And the tag-team interviewing had been largely abandoned. There was Greg Boyed manfully attempting to do the impossible – get a straight answer from Winston Peters; and Ali Mau doing an interview with Investigate magazine publisher Ian Wishart, who had brought us NZ First MP Richard Prosser’s thoughtful views on ‘Wogistan’. The interview was a model of its type. And finally, a really interesting item on just how long you can survive in the open sea without a life-jacket.
All in all, a nice example of what you might call ‘palatable current affairs’. Which is ironic really when you consider that last night was also the first night that Campbell Live beat its opposition on One with 352,600 viewers against Seven Sharp’s 296,700.
My unsolicited advice to Raewyn Rash would be not to be discouraged by last night’s figures which are a reflection of viewers’ response to the previous eight days and not to last night’s show. Stick with it.
Though can I please make one suggestion to Greg Boyed. It isn’t necessary in a probing interview to look and sound so angry that you’d like to climb across the desk and throttle your interviewee. Winston can be annoying, but not that annoying. And he has the sweetest smile.
The best comment I’ve heard about Seven Sharp came from Canterbury University senior journalism lecturer Tara Ross who said: We were invited to tweet and we were invited to vote, but what were we invited to think about?”
My answer would be: little of any consequence. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that – the utterly brilliant QI deals almost exclusively in ‘quite interesting’ ephemera. I can watch, and have watched half a dozen episodes on the trot and could happily have watched half a dozen more. Informative, irreverent, rude, challenging, side-splittingly funny. All the things Seven Sharp isn’t.
Given the quality of talent available to the BBC, the comparison is of course unfair. And QI makes no claim to be anything other than an (admittedly somewhat intellectual) entertainment.
Television New Zealand’s Head of News and Current Affairs, Ross Dagan, on the other hand, does a disservice to the producers and presenters on Seven Sharp, not to mention its viewers, by continuing to insist that Close Up’s replacement is still a ‘prime-time current affairs’ programme. It isn’t, at least not in the common usage of the term. Collins English Dictionary defines ‘current affairs’ as ‘relating to events and developments taking place in the world now, or the way in which these are covered or presented by the media’. The only prime-time network programme that currently comes close to that definition is Campbell Live.
Had Seven Sharp been billed as a ‘magazine programme offering a light-hearted and occasionally serious look at the events of the day’, its producers and presenters would have been spared the tsunami of criticism and viewer disappointment that has all but swept the programme away. Read the rest of this entry »
The word ‘disgusting’ is used by two people in the clip to describe the behaviour of the men in the boat, but it barely does justice to the characters of the sub-humans who took pleasure in repeatedly driving a jetboat into black swans on Tauranga harbour, then returning to have a second go at the birds they had already injured as they struggled in the water; who laughed as they mowed the swans down; who were so proud of their brutality that they filmed the slaughter and themselves. To what purpose? To relive the experience? To show their friends? To demonstrate the skill and the manliness of driving a jetboat at creatures that had little or no chance of getting out of the way? To savour once again the heady taste of inflicting such terrible suffering?
I guess you could call me a liberal in the area of crime and punishment. You’ll find several posts on this site where I attempt to persuade readers that before condemning people for their misdeeds, it’s important to look at the formative experiences and influences in childhood and early life that predetermined their later offending. That’s still my position. But sometimes, in the face of such cruelty, it’s difficult to make the connection. My instinct watching the video was to shout obscenities at the screen, to verbally abuse these killers with as much force and energy as they had physically abused their hapless victims. You worthless, fucking, bastard scum! Read the rest of this entry »
3.20 Thursday, 31 January. The guy who’s employed by the rich folks who live down the path two properties away from our house started leaf-blowing in the grounds of the top house 20 minutes ago. We abandoned our afternoon coffee in the garden, as we regularly have to, because of the intolerable noise. It’s not just him of course. The tree-lined avenues of Herne Bay are probably one of the noisiest places in Auckland: leaf-blowers, petrol-driven hedge trimmers, lawnmowers, weed-eaters, chain saws, water-blasters, concrete-cutters, and every conceivable noise associated with house renovation and house-building.
3.35 Thursday, 31 January. The guy who’s employed by the rich folks who live down the path two properties away from our house has emerged from the grounds of the top house and begun to drive the leaves down the path towards the second house. I could keep giving you reports on his progress, but I already know that he’ll finish leaf-blowing the houses on the path (and the path itself) at around 5 o’clock, two hours after he started. I know this because I bailed him up one evening and, with as much politeness as my frazzled nerves would allow, asked him how long leaf-blowing the grounds of the rich folks’ houses and the path that connects them would take. “About two hours,” he told me. It was around 6.15 on a beautiful summer evening on that occasion and I told him I thought it was pretty unreasonable to be making all this racket when most civilised people at that time would rather be listening to the birds than his leaf-blower. “Well, what do you want me to do?” he asked. “I’d like you to stop.” “OK,” he said. “I’ll come back and finish in the morning.” So I thought he was a pretty reasonable guy. Read the rest of this entry »
In her post yesterday first-class honours graduand in Political Studies, JC, explained the rules for next week’s confidence vote on the Labour Party leadership and for the selection process which will be automatically triggered if David Shearer fails to win 60% plus one (or 22 out of 34 Caucus members) support for his leadership.
If Shearer doesn’t get those 22 votes in Caucus, it seems highly unlikely that he will survive a leadership contest a month or so later, in which Caucus, the party membership and union affiliates have a 40/40/20 say. Failure to gain the required numbers in next week’s Caucus vote would itself be corrosive of confidence and support.
On the other hand, Shearer’s chances of getting those numbers have been enhanced by his improved showing in the polls following his Labour Party Conference speech last November and his axing of David Cunliffe from Labour’s front bench. And it is the polls which will decide Shearer’s ultimate fate. Read the rest of this entry »
Today a large parcel, addressed to Judy Callingham and Brian Edwards arrived at the Ponsonby Post Office. The sender was one Kevin Milne, whose name will not be unknown to you. My wife explained that it was probably a present from my former colleague to celebrate my 75th birthday – which was three-and-a- half months ago. Mr Milne had another engagement on the 4th of November, probably filming a commercial for hair restorer or erectile dysfunction pills in Hawaii, and had been unable to come to my party. He had apparently phoned her to say he’d been looking for an appropriate present ever since. I was very excited. This was clearly it.
The parcel was quite heavy and an unusual shape – 60 X 600mm. As we sat drinking our flat whites at a local cafe, I examined the gift with my fingers, trying to guess what exciting and no doubt expensive present (Kevin is loaded!) it might contain. Anticipation, as the Germans say, is the greatest pleasure. (Die Vorfreude ist die größte Freude)
Whatever it was appeared to be in a frame. Undoubtedly an artwork, quite possibly a recently discovered McCahon triptych. (Kevin is extremely generous!)
“Or at least a framed piece of carpet!” I joshed.
We sped home in the Mini Cooper, the McCahon triptych carefully stowed in the back. I tore off the outer wrapping. There indeed was a stylish birthday card.
It is too painful for me to quote the words that Mr Milne actually wrote. However, if this is essential to my complaint, I will ask my counsellor to sent the card to you. But the simple bitter truth is that the present was not for me at all, but for my wife. In three-and-a-half months Mr Milne had not been able to find anything for me. ‘So you get the gift, Judy,’ he wrote, ‘Brian won’t mind.’
Well, if a more serious case of false advertising combined with breach of promise has ever come your way, I’d be very surprised. This is like having a wedding photographer lose your photographs or finding your Big Mac is half the size it looked in the ad. Only ten times worse!
Milne must pay for my hurt feelings and he must pay dearly.
Could it get any worse? Oh yes, Fair Go crime fighters, it could. For Milne’s gift was indeed a painting. And like the McCahon I had thought it was, it did have writing on it. And what it said, the very text my wife would display on her office wall for all to see , was grossly defamatory of her husband, the birthday boy!
I look forward to your urgent response. I am available to be filmed at any time and assume you will provide make-up and a hair stylist.
