Promising negotiations

Press, 27 September 1988, Page 11

Promising negotiations

A.X. Grant

on television

The Christchurch-based television consortium TVI% has made a number of enterprising sorties into sports television in recent weeks. Through a Spanish subsidiary, Paellavision, it is negotiating for world rights to coverage of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. “Not only are we negotiating for world coverage rights,” the consortium’s spokesman, well-known solicitor Mr I. B. Prolix, told your reporter, “but we are trying to persuade the Spanish authorities to shift the games from Barcelona to Granada. The reason for this proposal is that there is a very wellknown and colourful song about Granada, which would make a wonderful theme song for our coverage. Whereas there are no songs about Barcelona, or if there are I haven’t heard them.” The Spanish authorities are said to be resisting Mr Prolix’s proposal, but he believes that he will, as he puts it, “bring them round to my way of thinking” by doing a deal with the International Olympic Committee which would see bullfighting intro-

duced for the first time as an Olympic sport.

And in America TVI% is arranging for live coverage to New Zealand of Michael Fay’s next approach to the New York State Supreme Court on October 12. “The courtroom duel over the America’s Cup is likely to be a darned sight more interesting than the races were,” Mr Prolix says,

"and so we will have our cameras in the courtroom and the judge’s chambers. This will truly be a hearing in camera, if I may essay a jest, and the action will be commented upon by a top-flight team consisting of myself, Bill McCarthy and Corbin Bernsen from ‘L.A. Law.’ Sponsorship of the event will be by the Civil Aviation Division of the Ministry of Transport, not because there is any connection with civil aviation but because, as a division spokesman put it, “Everybody else is sponsoring something, and we saw no reason why we should miss out.” And Mr Prolix has revealed plans for TVI% to achieve between 80 and 90 per cent local content within two months of its opening on-air date (New Zealand Trotting Cup Day this year). “TV3 has been told it has got to get up to 40 per cent within three years,” Mr Prolix told your reporter, “and TVNZ is currently only around 21 per cent. But we are going to eclipse both of these efforts by a simple programming device. Anything on our channel

which isn’t already made in New Zealand will be preceded by its own computer graphic. So that, for example, if we were screening ‘Neighbours,’ we would call it ‘Neighbours, New Zealand-Style.’ It would still be the same Australian programme, but calling it ‘Neighbours, New Zealand-Style’ gives it a New Zealand identity, conferred by the locally produced computer graphic. “This will be an across-the-board policy, so that, for example, if we get world rights to the Queen’s Christmas broadcast, and I am hopeful that we will, because I think we could do a lot more with it than the 8.8. C. are doing at the moment — put an entertainment break in it, for a start — then we will call it ‘The Queen’s Christmas Broadcast, New ZealandStyle.’ “Thus we will be using television as it should be used — to promote and foster a true New Zealand sense of identity.” Mr Prolix then went off to secure a number of widely awaited adjournments in • the District Court.