KEY POINTS:
Three things about the new series of Artsville, which starts this Sunday at the ludicrous hour of 11pm. That may not be the set time for the entire series. It depends on the length of the preceding show, which this Sunday night is the longer than usual drama The Best Man.
Hang on, though. When the last series of Artsville screened, TV One sandwiched Airport between it and the drama, which indicates a certain lack of comprehension of what's going on in our community.
The arts in all their forms are booming in New Zealand; therefore there is - do we have to keep banging on about this? Yes - a strong case to argue against the late-night ghetto.
If you agree, please let them know.
Second, the series debuts with a feature on Lyttelton artist Bill Hammond, who never gives interviews and remains relatively anonymous.
So director Alan D'Arcy Ercon has taken the oblique approach and constructed a mini-drama called Flightless about a family man attacked, literally, by his wife for leaving his job.
Cast out and adrift, the man wanders around galleries looking at Hammond bird paintings, and feels himself falling like one of those doomed birds "watching for Buller".
The piece is on more solid ground when reality intervenes in the form of curator Justin Paton, collector Jenny Gibbs - lucky her, she has at least three large Hammonds in her home - and Wellington dealer Peter McLeavey, who has stood by Hammond for the duration of his career.
The device of using actor Ian Hughes to act out the man-alone drama is not a roaring success, whether he's listening to Gibbs' views on the mystery of Hammond or examining preserved carcasses of extinct birds like huia and North Island and South Island piopio at Te Papa.
Overall, though, seeing Hammond's work is a tremendous treat, culminating in images of two jaw-dropping works painted in 2006 featuring a proud new hero: the extinct Great New Zealand Eagle.
Third, the episode ends with Janet Frame's voice reading, from long ago, O Lung Flowering Like a Tree, a meditation on cancer, with imagery filmed by Andrew Bancroft. This means Janet Frame will be on air on your screen just before midnight. That's not good enough.
