Afternoon delight on TV
Education might be on the back burner, till things return to normal, whatever that is. But one thing’s for sure, there’ll be a huge uptake in students wanting to study science. Remember when you were a child and wanted to know what got your parents’ attention?
I remember staying terribly quiet in the living room before transmission of the racy Peyton Place in the hope that my parents would forget I was there. On the rare occasion I did get to see this sexy and sophisticated piece of very adult television, I was too young to understand why it kept Mum and Dad so glued to it, which of course, made children want to watch it even more.
Now it is the public broadcast of the TV One Special screening every day at 1pm that grips parents and has become the only show in town to a generation, who may have abandoned mainstream TV news in preference for other news outlets.
The public health broadcast and debrief to the nation, releasing the daily numbers of the pandemic, has stopped play and interrupted boredom in households up and down the country.
Kids being home-schooled will have started to notice that the daily broadcast has become part of their household’s daily routine. Now, more than ever, as the incarceration can easily slide into existential angst, the double act of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield gives much-needed punctuation to a free-form day.
Children observing the adulatory songs about Bloomfield, and his image appearing on anything from tote bags to tea towels, will be both aware of, and curious about, all the noise surrounding this humble bureaucrat.
The same goes for high-profile science communicators Siouxsie Wiles and Nanogirl. These heroes of the pandemic crisis are making science seem cool to kids, while adults are thinking, ‘‘Gee, whoever thought decency and science could be so sexy?’’
Foreigners observing our ‘‘go hard and go early’’ elimination model could be forgiven for thinking that New Zealand’s mad crush over bureaucrat Bloomfield means that we are red-hot socialists.
For those locked-down viewers weary of watching CNN, Fox News, BBC World and Al Jazeera, with their endless shots of community testing, test tube racks, and casts of masked men and women, why not switch over to Parliament TV to watch what’s going down during the Zoom meetings of the Epidemic Response Committee.
The committee is headed by Opposition leader Simon Bridges, who should really, in the interests of beefing up local TV production, fix a camera to the bonnet of the car to make another series of Go South ... and North with Simon Bridges on his trips back and forth from Tauranga to the Beehive.
The devil’s in the details of this show, where you can examine the background and bookshelves of cross-party MPs and be startled by the folically erect hairstyle of chief trade negotiator Vangelis Vitalis.
Suddenly politics and nationalism is fashionable, as seen on Seven Sharp with the inhabitants of the suburb of Camborne flag-waving and singing the national anthem each night at their gates.
These neighbourhood antics make the residents feel good about their collective effort of staying home, and are far better for our mental health than watching the fall of America under the lost and misguided direction of Trump.
It’s the sufferers of coulrophobia (fear of clowns) watching the orange man’s bully-boy tactics in the Rose Garden that I feel sorry for.