TV Review Diana Wichtel
You can’t complain too much about a whole prime-time hour of sisters doing it for themselves.
It was an episode that gave literal resonance to the term couch potato. I was on the couch and sometime MasterChef winners Karena and Kasey Bird were unleashing an avalanche of the unfashionably starchy stem tubers. Back for another series of Karena & Kasey’s Kitchen Diplomacy, the sisters from Maketu discovered that in Ireland they really do eat a truckload of potatoes. It was off to Gallagher’s Boxty House in Temple Bar, Dublin. Motto: “The humble spud made beautiful.” Boxty is a sort of potato pancake arrangement and comes in endless variations, upon which the sisters were required to chow down while dispatching the local ale.
This is old-school, undemanding, pre-digested television. The show even provided subtitles, such was the gorgeous Enniskillen accent of one local. There’s a lot of scripted voiceover, which is a shame. It doesn’t give the engaging hosts a lot to do that doesn’t sound pre-scripted to within an inch of its life. For a masterclass on how to do a world foodie tour going, essentially “Yum!” but with attitude, check out Viceland’s F---, That’s Delicious. Karena and Kasey give indications that they would be up for the challenge of being allowed to be more themselves. Let them.
Meanwhile, here was more evidence that television has an oddly disordered relationship with food. The news has almost daily warnings about not eating it. Yet prime time is full of MasterChef, My Kitchen Rules and Karena and Kasey extolling the delights of boxty with bacon and whisky cream sauce. It does your head in. Still, it turns a blandish travelogue into a sort of high-stakes intrepid journey of vicarious inadvisable scoffing and quaffing.
Awhole hour of sisters doing it for themselves, in so far as they can in prime time: you can’t complain too much. Kitchen Diplomacy is followed by indefatigable veterans of stage and screen the Topp Twins, chewing their way heroically around Aotearoa on our behalf in the return of Topp Country. Someone’s got to do it. Lynda Topp explained the concept: “People to meet, food to eat. Yeehah.” A visit to a backyard in Auckland’s Sandringham establishes that it is possible to make a pavlova in a pizza oven. “Look at that, Jools: crunchy, gooey, crunchy.”
There are occasional nostalgic comic interludes with classic Topp characters – Prue and Dilly, Ken and Ken – to remind us what a truly strange little nation we are. Things get a little more serious down on the Firth of Thames. Peter Thorburn, also known as Piako Pete, sells his freshly caught flounder and other fish from his shop in Pipiroa. He takes the visit from the Topps as an opportunity to do a bit of lobbying about a proposal to close the inner Hauraki Gulf to commercial fishing. “We’ll all just go broke. We’ll all be in the dole office.” Is the area over-fished? “Definitely not,” he declared. All of this passed unremarked on by our hosts. The Topps have never backed away from a political discussion. A little engagement with the issues raised would have given the show some welcome grit.
But it was off to meet the selfsufficient Vinbrux family of Oamaru. One son runs a butcher shop, another is a baker. “Does anyone make candles?” The camera records the preparation of Christel Vinbrux’s delicious-looking sour beef roast. “Do you know the cow?” wonders a Topp. “Rosa,” says Christel. “When they kick, they make only one season.”
Topp Country has made three seasons, and like a backyard pizza-oven pavlova, it’s defiantly soft-centred. This, we are told, is the final series. Old-fashioned and all as it is, that feels like a shame.
KARENA & KASEY’S KITCHEN DIPLOMACY, TVNZ 1, Thursday, 7.30pm. TOPP COUNTRY, TVNZ 1, Thursday, 8.00pm.
“We’ll all just go broke. We’ll all be in the dole office.”