Current affairs a victim

Press, 1 December 1987, Page 21

Current affairs a victim

It is not for a humble television reviewer to prejudge the validity of Sir Robert Muldoon’s official complaint that last Thursday night’s "Close-Up” item about the Waitangi Tribunal’s decision on Bastion Point was biased. The item was certainly presented with commendable speed, since the tribunal's decision had only been released that very day. As to bias, the basis of the tribunal’s decision was that over the years the Ngati Whatua had experienced an extraordinary amount of bad faith at the hands of successive governments. Presumably Sir Robert’s point is that there was an equivalent amount of good faith exhibited to the Ngati Whaatua which was not referred to in the programme. It will be interesting, and reassuring, to learn the details of it. This was the last “Close-Up,” although one gathers that some of the cast will be returning under a different name next year. It has been a valuable programme, and the main thing wrong with it is there weren’t other programmes like it on on different nights.

Money difficulties are always given as the reason for TVNZ’s lack of commitment to any particular area, but current affairs has been a victim in recent times of whatever financial constraints the Broadcasting Corporation has found itself labouring under. In many ways current affairs television is more important than news television: news is just brief gobbets of fact; current affairs tries to make some sense out of them. “CloseUp” did its best, though I was never as bowled over

as some people by Genevieve Westcott’s exhaustive investigations of pointless crimes. In its last programme “Close-Up” revealed that 21 New Zealanders a day leave our shores to settle in Queensland. They are attracted by the fact that wine is $4.50 a cask and there are no Maoris. I don’t blame anyone for being attracted to a place where wine is $4.50 a cask, and if we are losing 21 racists a day, my only regret is that it is not 210, so that the rest of us can get on with living in a country which, whatever its faults, would not have kept someone like Joh Bjelke-Petersen in power for 19 years. “Dixie Chicken” is an awkward, uncomfortable show to look at. The credits at the end go racing across the screen from right to left at a speed which causes the eyeball muscles to send messages of protest to the brain. The show is lit in a cold, unattractive way. Andy Anderson has an engaging personality but seems very unrelaxed, particularly when doing unconvincing things with bongos while linking the show. However disagreeable

to look at, the show provided some good music last Friday, especially from Wdrking Holiday and Hammond Gamble/ Hammond is the best singer in the country, not excluding Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. I am sure that Hammond could, if called upon, give a convincing account of Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim,” whereas the dame wouldn’t know where to begin with a song of Hammond’s like “Look What Midnight’s Done to Me.” Like all country-music shows, “Dixie Chicken” is under attack from coun-try-music fanatics and whirling dervishes who maintain that they alone possess the true definition of country music. Why a good-natured and tolerant form of music should attract so many zealots and fundamentalists I don’t know. But it is not worth paying any attention to them: the greater part of the audience for a coun-try-music show simply enjoys the music, and the minority is split into about 800 warring sects. A bit like England after the Civil War, except that the lutes weren’t amplified then, and Jim Reeves’s big hit was “Put Your Sweet Lips a Little Closer to the Town Crier.”