Fair Go at 40 is nice and naughty
I vividly remember Kevin Milne bursting into my office in Christchurch accusing me of being the ratbag of Riccarton. It seems like yesterday.
My office looked out on Cathedral Square, before the earthquake, and Kevin’s camera crew had been filming me from as far up the cathedral as they could climb. When they had enough footage they stormed into my office to confront me.
‘‘Kevin,’’ I said. There was a stunned silence. ‘‘Malcolm!’’ We’d been colleagues at Avalon for a few years. ‘‘I’m looking for a guy who’s been shafting people off,’’ he said. ‘‘He’s in the floor above,’’ I told him. And so we burst into his office one floor up, but he’d gone.
In hindsight, I wished they’d shown the footage of me. I could have used the defamation money to build my business. All I got was a mention in Kevin’s book.
So, I watched Fair Go At 40 (TV One, Mondays). Did they have a section on investigations that went wrong? Yes they did, but they were far more memorable than mine. They painted a disputed boundary line on a house and couldn’t get it off and two elderly women, who searched a tub of ice cream for missing ingredients, were treated for frostbite.
Fair Go started in 1977 with host Brian Edwards wanting to sort out people who are hurt.
He passed the torch on to Philp Alpers, Kerre Mcivor, Kevin Milne and now Pippa Wetzell and Hadyn Jones. There are still people being hurt.
At the start, Fair Go had Spencer Jolly, an investigative journalist, who was like a terrier with a bone. But, in 2018, there are fewer terriers and fewer bones. As it enters its 41st year, the programme needs to get hungry again and rediscover advocacy journalism.
There are ratbags remaining out there, even if I’m not one of them.
With the arrival of February, new series are being rolled out. In the case of Strike Force (Soho, Sundays), it wasn’t released, it escaped. Shorn of established stars and a cast of nobodies, it’s long on carnage and short on character. Wyatt and Mcallister are the new heroes. They’re part of Special Ops.
Morgan Ives is evil and ‘‘loves money’’ and is determined to lay his hands on $5 million at the cost of plenty of lives. So, he arranges for the capture of wealthy Prince Khalid Al-hebtani at a nightclub. A monster bodyguard grabs him, sprays bullets at the revellers and then, like Elvis, leaves the building.
Wyatt and Mcallister aren’t far behind, but first they have to find Ives, his crony Omair Idrisi and Omair’s wife, Jane Lowry (Katherine Kelly), who’s been radicalised by some extreme sect. Kelly used to be in Mr Selfridge, but I much prefer her as Becky on
Coro Street.
9-1-1 (TV3, Mondays) offers a glimmer of hope. It’s a variation of all those emergency series. This one features the dispatchers and first responders, whether they’re cops, paramedics or firefighters.
In an enema of emergencies, they attend to a baby that’s been flushed down a toilet, a teenager who’s hit his head on a diving board and, in the most enjoyable vignette, a fleeing burglar who’s hit by a jet of water from a fire appliance.
The acting is solid and I particularly liked Connie Britton
(Nashville) as the efficient 911 operator. The series could succeed if they keep the action to a maximum and their traumatic home lives to a minimum.
Every time a Palmerston North person appears on TV3, I groan. The background to the interview is an out of focus shot of the base of the clocktower. The city has much to offer, but instead viewers see our Square suffering from the DTS.
If you can overcome that, then local parenting commentator, Joseph Driessen, on The Project (TV3, Wednesday) had some sound advice for fathers. In saying that Victorian culture has left our society puritanically uptight and sexually oppressed, he encouraged dads to ‘‘go for it’’ and kiss their sons and daughters. Sons need their father’s affection and care. Sound advice.
He also said society covered up the legs of a grand piano because they were too sexy. I’ll never watch Michael Houstoun play our Steinway again in the same light.