Television and Radio

Press, 12 August 1978, Page 11

Television and Radio

By

JOHN COLLINS

“Superkids” (SPTV, Thursday) would be more honestly named “Not Very Extraordinary Kids At All,” though I imagine such a title would be unlikely to attract an avalanche of viewers, even given our tradition of regarding mediocrity as a virtue. The children on Peter Sinclair’s show, a competition to find New Zealand’s young answer to Renaissance Man, are just not that super. I can concede that their

mums might well love them and that they do quite well at school, but I can’t say that I am astounded that some of them knew Midas was the king with the golden touch or that all of them seemed quite adept at running through a line of tyres placed on the ground while Sinclair desperately tried to inject some colour with the sort of excited commentary that might have sat well with film of Marines planting the flag on Iwojima out which seems a little too much for Boy Scout obstacle races. I suppose, in the same way that beauty competitions tend to attract rather plainer girls than one might bump into at

the local bus stop, superkid competitions draw only reasonably bright kids with pushy parents, leaving the really super kids at home inventing things or saving up to emigrate to Australia, or whatever else bright, young people do in their spare time. Lolita was a super kid. James Pierpoint Morgan, the American railroad king who made and lost four fortunes before becoming senile at the age of four, was a super kid. Even Davy Crockett, who

kill’t him a bar when he was only three, must have been a super kid. But I doubt if they would ever have been found giving a one-minute speech on the subject of the twenty-first birthday, or balancing on wooden stools to the breathless commentary of a Sinclair. And as for their go at public speaking. Well, if those were the superkids. New Zealand need not fear that it will lose its position as Most Inarticulate Nation Since the Invention of the Human Lip. Certainly one of the strangest examples of the human lip is Pam Ayres ably interviewed by Sharon Crosbie — whom I hope one day to cuddle.