‘Midweek’ — ‘E’ for effort

Press, 22 January 1982, Page 11

‘Midweek’ — ‘E’ for effort

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Douglas McKenzie

W’hatever accolade “Midweek" (One. Wednesdays) may deserve for its efforts to deal with current affairs at this time of the year it does at least deserve a medal for gallantry. The new programme has been launched into the demanding area of current affairs at the height of the summer and holidays when there are. practically speaking, no current affairs. This is so, certainly, as far as New Zealand is concerned; and "Midweek” is a local programme whether it likes it or not.

The main difficulty, of course, is that TV. having gone to enormous lengths over the last few years to elevate politics and politicians to the position where they actually equate the term “current affairs.” has left itself high and dry when the politicians — or the only one they think counts — is either at the beach or in Antarctica.

By the time politics are going full blast again, no doubt "Midweek” will be replaced by one of the big-gun political programmes. Expressions of sympathy are therefore in order for “Midweek,” which has had to do its best with pretty thin material and little chance of reward at the end of it all. Thin material tends to mean warmed-up material — items already introduced somewhere else. Sometimes these ideas are shepherded in as though they have the virtue of “backgrounding” the subject, but the result is usually fairly transparent.

This week “Midweek” gamely tackled the mining applications which have been abandoned around Rotorua, and the Moonie business. The first of these items had to rely on quite a lot of footage which had been on the news only a couple of nights previously. Such repeating might well be in line with general

TV programming philosophy, or necessity, this summer, but it did remarkably little for “Midweek.”

As it happened, the news footage had been particularly stodgy even when it was fresh, so “Midweek" was struggling twice. There was one part of the Rotorua news footage which actually had nothing to do with Rotorua but may be worth referring to anyway because it is such a strange TV convention, and this is the habit of reverently turning the camera on reporters’ hands when they are notetaking. Whether reporters put their mind-jogging squiggles on paper by means of a 10cm paint brush, an eighteenthcentury quill breasting a film of split beer, or a stubby forefinger lubricated by blood jabbed out of a slashed wrist seems to have not the slightest relevance to any subject that the filming is about.

Yet TV goes on doing this, time and time again, as though the sacred fingers grasping the sacred pen (or pencil) addressing the sacred paper had some inherent status or significance. As a matter of fact, if the camera did its job properly and got close to the note-pad it might reveal that, in spite of an expensive polytechnic education, some reporters are still not using shorthand and that, in longhand, their calligraphy is deplorable and their spelling grotesque. To return reluctantly to “Midweek”: the Moonie item was helpful but still rather far behind events.