When you're making a documentary series, your primary consideration is the talent. You can do all kinds of crazy stuff to make some interesting sausage out of whatever your ostensible subject is but without good talent you can do nothing.
In the first episode of the second season of the documentary series The Big Ward, which airs this Thursday, the first person we meet after charismatic, attractive, Lance O'Sullivan-esque surgeon and star Richard Babor is truculent, 200kg-plus, 20-year-old Jackson.
We stare for a long time at an almost cruelly intimate shot of Jackson sitting alone on a chair next to a vending machine in the antiseptic corridor of the Manukau Superclinic, where he is awaiting an important appointment with Babor regarding possible weight loss surgery.
Jackson shifts awkwardly in the chair, and appears to groan and possibly to sleep, behind his dark glasses and between his white earbuds. It's revealed via voiceover that he's hungover.
After a wait every bit as painful for us as for him, we follow him down the hall, listening to a disembodied interviewer ask him questions he clearly doesn't want to answer.