Talk about a waste of talent

Try searching for a decent show to watch on free-to-air television, especially at the weekends, and you have to head for the hills of Netflix or Lightbox. But you can soon run through those two streaming services, which provide documentaries, movies and award-winning TV shows, many of which you may have already seen on free-to-air.

Netflix can’t make their original shows fast enough. When one is bleary-eyed from being coaxed into watching just one more episode, hungry eyes can get quite ratty about the lack of new programmes available.

Whoever’s in charge of pushing out the product needs to speed up the assembly line. Faster creatives, faster, faster!

Whole paddocks of actors, directors, producers – the whole kit and caboodle of the creative process – need to be working non-stop round the clock to meet the needs of the orb-addled consumer who can’t wait to hit the couch and disappear down the tube. Surely it’s time subscribers were offered bespoke Netflix and Lightbox couches, specially designed with small fridges and in-built commodes for the hardcore beached whale viewer.

At least with Sky TV’s SoHo channel there is still a semblance of dignified rationing going on, the viewer having to wait one whole week before they can see the next episode of their quality hit. Delayed gratification as opposed to the binge watch – it’s so last decade.

But when you realise that you don’t have the will to watch yet another crime show featuring a strong female lead with her mandatory flaws and foibles; and when you see another sun coming up through the crack in the curtains and you haven’t been to bed yet; it’s time to pull the plug.

With the circadian rhythms blown to bits by the bright lights of watching devices, one could abandon viewership and rely on repairing to the scratcher with an old-fashioned transistor to listen to RadioLIVE’s Weekend Variety Wireless with Graeme Hill.

Hill’s 8pm-midnight show, with its regular features of Outsiders with Gerard Hindmarsh, Letter from America with John Dybvig, John McCrystal’s Shipwreck Tales, and Media Stick ,to name but a few of the highlights, has been a consistently intelligent and riveting show. It’s still going, but alas, it won’t be coming back next year. What a massive waste of talent.

Hill’s show, along with many other RadioLIVE casualties, will be replaced with a hybrid of music from the 50s though to the 70s as heard on the Magic station, to be combined with some sort of chatter to be called Magic Talk. It hardly sounds like something to be looked forward to, or ‘‘magic’’ appointment listening.

What sort of format the Magic Talk will be remains to be seen, but the RadioLIVE Drive show and The AM Show get to survive, the latter an unexciting breakfast TV show that manages to look good up against TVNZ’s charisma-free Breakfast show.

Cuts to RadioLIVE talkback leaves the field free for the hard-Right hosts on Newstalk ZB, such as Mike Hosking, and Heather du Plessis-Allan with her penchant for borderline hate speech calling Pacific Islanders ‘‘leeches’’ and Nauru a ‘‘hellhole’’. Larry Williams chimes in, calling the setting for Apec in Papua New Guinea a ‘‘cesspit’’.

One wonders what sort of demographic Magic Talk will attract with its classic hits from decades gone by and a token gesture towards talkback. How ironic that spoof talkback host Ken Oath and his show Go Ahead Caller returns to RNZ to keep up the quota. All satire aside, RNZ would do well to sweep in now and pick up Graeme Hill’s show from the scrapheap and inject some radio life into its programming. In that day you will say: “Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done, and proclaim that his name is exalted. Isaiah 12:4