Colin Hogg: Jabbering spoils a thing of beauty

The Secret Lives of Dancers lets viewers into the thoughts of its dancer stars.

Extraordinary shots of dancers’ gazelle-like grace could have done without endless inane commentary.

Some television shows spoil their chances for love by talking too much, filling every possible space with words, pre-empting everything anyone says with a voice-over telling you half of what you're about to hear anyway.

It drives me crazy. Which is a pity in the case of what might otherwise have been a most unusual experience on primetime TV in this country - something a bit beautiful about ballet.

And please don't get me wrong because I'm not pushing a cause here. I'm not a secret ballet fan at all. It's just that The Secret Lives of Dancers (TV3, Saturday, 7pm) could have made me one if the show had only shut up and let me enjoy looking at it.

This local series, done in a zesty documentary-light style, follows the legs, lives and loves of some of the dancers with the Royal New Zealand Ballet. The Secret Lives of Dancers launched its third run on Saturday, setting out to follow the company through a full-on season that included a tour of China, 60th anniversary celebrations and a production of that old ballet biggie, Swan Lake.

Though if that all sounds slightly serious, then this show's a little less so, promising, in its amped-up intro, "exclusive access to all areas" (cue close-up of male dancer's bare butt) and glimpses into the aforementioned lives and loves and all that (cue talk about ballet being "like a drug").

But the dancey stuff was so beautifully shot, I kept watching anyway, despite the babble that never paused for a moment to let the pictures do much talking.

If the dancer stars of Secret Lives weren't letting us into their secret thoughts ("he has the most fantastic set of buttocks"), then that ever-present voice-over was filling in all the gaps with a lumpy, humourless script saying an awful lot about nothing much at all in the dullest possible way.

We have to accept, I guess, that the only way a show about anything as old-fashioned and dangerously arty as the Royal New Zealand Ballet is ever going to get on primetime TV is to sex itself up.

It has to get into the dressing rooms, back to the grotty, shared flat, exaggerate the tensions, stretch small things into big drama.

Which Secret Lives has duly done with its gossipy curiosity and its intrusion into the dancers' private lives, though pretty much all those dancers do is dance or think about dancing.

But couldn't the series' makers have done it a little better?

Because in the rare moments when they aren't talking about themselves, when they're caught by the camera in the pain and concentration of rehearsal, the young dancers are extraordinary creatures - possibly gazelles.

But gazelles who can casually lift one leg right up behind their heads while standing resolutely on the outstretched toes of the other.

In fact, with more of an eye for beauty and a lot less jabbering, this show might have been something wonderful, a seamless combination of the inner thoughts of the young and restless and outer beauty of that thing they do so well - you know, the dance bit.