TV review: Consulate caper lacks a Royal Assassin but still hits the mark

Bikini babe, ambassador and a disgraced diplomat set the tone. Photo / Supplied

Diplomatic Immunity (TV One, 10pm, last night) should win the award for Most Gratuitous Plot Line Involving a Girl in a Bikini Role since Baywatch. Although Baywatch was (oh yes, that's right) set on a beach.

Diplomatic Immunity is about a fictitious Pacific nation called Fe'ausi, where there might conceivably be girls in bikinis on beaches, but is set in a house in the Auckland suburbs which doubles as the Fe'ausi consulate.

The bikini babe is Leilani (Lesley-Ann Brandt), daughter of the ambassador, Jonah (Dave Fane), and the reason she gets around in a bikini is because she uses the components of said costume to write what must necessarily be short pro-democracy slogans. Yes, really and, no, of course not really. She's there for the ogle factor and to lead disgraced diplomat Leighton Mills (played with bureaucratic brilliance, like a tightly furled black brolly, by Craig Parker) astray.

Mills gets the posting nobody would want after he's caught bonking a visiting royal in a car. To get his career back on track again he has to clean up the notoriously corrupt consulate. Nobody, except bikini girl (who wants to enlist his, err, sympathies for her political cause), wants the man from Wellington around. They could have him knocked off by the Royal Assassin. They don't have a Royal Assassin. "That's an oversight."

Perhaps they could flick him with towels. Or send him to Albania. "I think we'll save that as a back-up plan." I rather wish they'd saved it in that place they keep the jokes that don't quite cut it. Which might be at the bottom of the laundry basket full of money because at the consulate they, yes, groan, launder money.

There was one fantastically un-PC joke involving a large sum of grant money for a water purification plant which was instead spent on a party to celebrate the cutting of the King's toenails.

"Trimming the King's toenails is of huge cultural importance. Young men, they train for four years to wear the breathing apparatus, to wield the gold-plated toenail clippers." On the wall is a photograph of young men wearing gas masks.

They should all just learn to get along. Jonah: "We fought in two wars together."

Mills: "You promised us troops and they never turned up."

Jonah: "Yeah, yeah, that's an island thing."

Last night's first episode lumbered along rather, that's the nature of first episodes. We've got to be introduced to the characters and have the backstory filled in. This involved an entirely unnecessary flashback to the party that was the scene of Mills' disgrace. I think we would have got it without that.

But Diplomatic Immunity is worth sticking with.

Next week features Mills in a loincloth (a sight which might make even bikini girl feel overdressed) and the script and the players get to settle down to having an obviously jolly time in what is shaping up to be a jolly good romp.