The Project is like 7 Days
If you can imagine a sanitised version of 7 Days, then you have The Project. It’s the new weekly current affairs programme TV3 will introduce at 7pm later this month. I’ve only viewed the Australian version, but the format will be little different.
In Oz, four presenters watch and react to the news, present their own slant, interview the celeb of the day, add their humour and wrap up what’s been happening in the world over the past 24 hours.
On several occasions, the news items are tailor made for the presenters’ ‘‘vet tales’’ and their quirky view of life. And so we had Trump, Malcolm Trumble (no-one could pronounce Turnbull), open air urinals on the Gold Coast, Get Naked Australia, an appeal to parents to put down their cellphones when they pick up kids and the Mundine/green fight.
‘‘Are you ready to rumble,’’ the ring announcer asked and the quartet agreed you can’t rumble without being ready. But they rumbled. One presenter believed that parents will pocket their phones if their kids were more interesting. It could be the other way round.
You get the picture? It’s the 6pm news with jokes, or 7 Days without being gross. It’s a format that should work, but TV3 needs to hire the right presenters or, better still, vary the faces. Our own Jon Bridges (ex Freyberg High) is producer of The Project, so he knows where the southern motorway leads beyond the Huntly Power Station.
Vet Tales (TV One, Wednesdays) also has a Palmerston North connection. Both Mark Young and Stacey Tremain studied at Massey Vet School and they now run practices at Kumeu and Rotorua.
Mark had to treat an asthmatic horse called Chocolate. Now the horse was white or pale cream, so there’s probably an albino chocolate derivative to match. But what if the owner, Isobel, was colour blind and the horse was black? Would she call it Blondie and wonder why it shone in the dark?
Mark gave Chocolate the dreaded plastic bag treatment over its head to test its lung capacity. It’s a bit like the rubber glove used by customs officials to scare travellers.
Fortunately, there was no sinister growth in the horse’s lungs. Chocolate received a longlasting injection, which would prevent it competing in the Tokyo Olympics, but keep it alive.
Meanwhile, Stacey had to remove a door stopper an inquisitive dog called Meg had swallowed. Meg survived the difficult surgery, but was a sore and sorry woof.
However, the door stopper gave me an idea. Could all those TV treatments for snoring be used to reduce the decibel level of barking dogs? Such an invention would earn someone millions and allow thousands of people to sleep at night (and probably snore).
Vet Tales is diverting enough, but the evergreen Harry’s Practice is in another league. Now Dr Harry Cooper would know if there’s a doggie version of Prozac.
Indian Summers (TV One Sundays) muddled its way through the first series. It featured too many eccentric Brits doing too many stupid things and getting in the way of what could be a gripping story based on India’s struggle for independence.
The new series, set in 1935, picks up where the old one left off. But nothing much has changed. Despite the viceroy having a heart attack in the first episode, all the slightly unhinged characters and their intrigues are still there. Private secretary to the viceroy Ralph Whelan has survived and he and wife, Madeleine, are probably as close as you’d get to sympathetic characters. But they’ve been invented in a studio, not carved out of real life. Together with Cynthia Coffin (Julie Walters), the proprietor of Royal Simla Club, they curry favour – in every sense of the word – with the foreign office that, in turn, sends Lord Hawthorne out to size up the situation and the contestants. Meanwhile, Aafrin Dalan, a less than civil servant, gets caught up in all sorts of unbelievable attempts to topple the administration while G&TS are consumed and Gilbert and Sullivan is sung at the Royal Simla Club. I suspect Indian Summers will bumble along for another three years until World War Two. But it’s unlikely late night viewers will want to wait that long.