It's only a fortnight since some crazed crazy unleashed on us innocents something called The Ridges, but I think you'll agree the world is already a lesser place. It's a divided world, one torn in two by fanatics on one side saying the Ridges should never be allowed to order a coffee on Ponsonby Rd again, while on the other there are zealots who will stop at nothing to buy up Sally's unique handcrafts on Trade Me. It's all very disturbing.
So thank goodness there was good news late last week - though I must confess I thought of it as bad news.
As I was about to flee my desk last Friday afternoon, nzherald.co.nz announced that New Zealand was to finally have its own version of The X Factor, courtesy of TV3, the home of classy entertainment for old men in raincoats, and of New Zealand on Air, which had very generously handed out $1.6 million of our money on our behalf for yet more rubbish.
The X Factor? I'd never seen it, though I knew the drill. These shows are always about a bunch of nobodies who want to be somebodies, one of whom, after a lot of faffing about, wins a vote and briefly becomes a somebody who then, after a duff album or perhaps two, becomes a nobody again. It is a winning TV formula that has different names and guises, including, to name two, The Voice, a cutting-edge Australian contest which finished last Friday with a 19-year-old former sex shop assistant beating a 40-year-old father of two, and New Zealand's Got Talent, which a couple of weeks back established for us where antediluvian reggae singers and ancient swimwear models go to die.
It turns out it is a purgatory of small boys with guitars singing about missing cats, fellows wearing T-shirts declaring their love of spooning with each other and people doing suggestive dancing to loud music. It's awful. Though I do hope that whoever eventually triumphs in New Zealand's Got Talent (in five years' time or whenever) will prove the exception to the rule that TV talent show winners in New Zealand might as well not have bothered.
