The poignant masochism of watching 'Holiday ’87'

Press, 20 October 1987, Page 11

The poignant masochism of watching 'Holiday ’87 '

A.K. Grant

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"Holiday ’B7” finished up on Friday. I was never really able to work out what the programme was there for. It was apparently popular, so presumably people either enjoyed contemplating holidays that they might one day take, or enjoyed even more the poignant masochism of contemplating holidays which they could never possibly afford to take. My main reason for watching the programme was to catch an occasional glimpse of my good friend Gary McCormick. Gazza is far too talented and agreeable to be wasted on a show like "Holiday ’87.” He should have his own show, in which he exercises his considerable ability to charm and entertain us. A pilot programme to this effect was made some time ago, but it appears to have disappeared into a gap in the cosmos. I make no apologies for pushing Gary’s barrow: someone has to push the barrow of talented people, given television’s own ability to put talent in a barrow and then dump it'

in a large hole. However, television did something worth while immediately following "Holiday ’87,” by putting Dr Ranginui Walker on "Fourth Estate.” The programme has been around a long time, so there may have been a Maori on it before, but I don’t remember one. Walker's thesis was that there is an anti-Maori, pro-pakeha bias in the media. He wasn’t, for my

taste, able to document it as fully as I would have liked, given the importance of the assertion, but he had some good trenchant stuff to say about Ross Meurant, who. seems to be working his way up be becoming our own Joe McCarthy, with his talk of plots, lists of names and ability to awaken the fears and prejudices of large parts of the population. Still, Meurant has the edge on McCarthy in one sense: McCarthy invented for himself an heroic war record which was an utter fabrication, whereas Meurant actually was in Red Squad, and some lunatic has now burned his garage down, thereby confirming for many people the truth of Meurant’s dangerous and nonsensical utterances. I hope that Walker is used again on “Fourth Estate,” or that if he isn’t some other intelligent and articulate Maori is: there obviously is a Maori perspective on the media, it isn’t the only one, but It needs to be aired from time to time; not for the benefit of Maoris but for the benefit of pakehas.

Might there not be room somewhere in the schedules for a programme called "Third Estate”? This I would envisage as being a weekly round-up of Parliamentary or other political doings. Radio New Zealand has such a programme, called “Focus on Politics,” which goes out around lunchtime on Sundays. A television equivalent would not at all be a bad idea: a supplement to the news and interviews we get at 6.30 and on- “ Eyewitness,” giving us informed comment on the week’s depredations and outrages from a panel of regular contributors, some informed and statesmanlike, some merely stroppy. The radio does it, and the papers do it; I can’t see why television shouldn’t have a .crack at it. It would, of course, be “talking heads,” but none the worse for that: politicians themselves are talking heads, even- though the impetus for what they are talking about often comes from less cerebral parts of the anatomy than the brain.