Linda Herrick: Nostalgia trip

Item 84 in the first episode of the new Rocked the Nation series which started counting down on C4 on Monday: a Tui billboard saying Rhys Darby is the funniest man on New Zealand television.

Yeah right.

I'm kidding; there is no Tui billboard featuring Darby but you have to wonder why he's fronting the show.

His "humour" is condescending, forced, a little grim - anything but funny. But everything else about the show is terrific, including Jaquie Brown's voiceovers.

The ever-changing Tui ads have long been part of our landscape, so inevitably the level of humour varies.

The guys from Back of the Y thought the ad agency should put up a sign saying, "These ads keep getting funnier ...

"The charm of RTN is not only being reminded of some only-in-New Zealand events that have created a blip over the past 35 years, but seeing an impressive range of people putting in their two bob's worth of comment, much of it pretty blunt.

Key moment number 82 featured the famously inarticulate Ingham twins and an exquisite clip of the runaways being "interviewed" by Paul Holmes at his Christmas party.

Oscar Kightley reckoned the Ingham phenomenon should be made into a movie - no dialogue, one presumes. Shihad's Jon Toogood simply called them morons.

Tem Morrison as Jango Fett in the Star Wars remakes was first up at number 100.

He complained that the filmmakers cloned his character into thousands of storm troopers that couldn't shoot straight.

Scribe and the singer from Elemeno P found the idea of "Maori guys in space" hard to take seriously.

There were some "gulp" moments, like the footage of Michael Galvin and Tim Balme near-naked in Ladies Night, allegedly the most successful New Zealand play of all time.

How embarrassing, on so many levels.

Number 96, the one where we get defensive when foreigners slag us off, was a litany of thinskinned-ness.

Keith Richards hated Invercargill; John Cleese named Palmerston North as a place to inspire suicide. Dave Fane agreed; he's been to Palmy.

I'm with RTN director Mitchell Hawkes, who reckons immigrants should watch the series to get an idea of what it is like to be a New Zealander. What an odd, rather sweet lot we are. Where else would you see a little Maori doll called Manu on a TV show for kids (Play School) who had no shoes, unlike the white dolls?

Why are we obsessed with animals like Shrek, Opo or Jin the escaped otter? Dai Henwood noted that while the rest of the world was chasing Osama bin Laden, our navy was searching for Jin.

RTN makes you appreciate while we have clever, creative people within our midst, we also have a fair share of eccentrics and dickheads, like the guys from Back of the Y, On the Mat and the jerk who blew up Opo.

Inexplicably, there are even some Kiwis who are lifelong dress-up devotees of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "That," said Mikey Havoc, "may be the most daring thing they ever do." But it doesn't hurt anyone.

Take note, boy racers.