KEY POINTS:
Weighty reality show Downsize Me (TV3, last night at 7.30) might be all about the hard business of shaping up but you can't bring on an ex-soap star as your chief candidate and not have a cliffhanger ending.
And last night's season debut, which took its usual gleeful tough love approach to former Shortland Street stalwart turned fatty Karl Burnett, delivered what must have been a nod to the national soap with the would-he-wouldn't-he finale. Would Burnett keep his word and turn up for that promised workout in his undies on the beach?
Of course we shouldn't indulge ourselves in any outsize comparison between Burnett and his former fictional character Nick. But like those burgers, chips and fizzy drinks that the former actor had become so addicted to, we just can't help giving in to the temptation.
The Shorty scriptwriters, ever vigilant for the socially relevant issue, must surely be kicking themselves for missing the opportunity to bring Nick back to tackle the obesity/junk food problem. Just think. They could have had a bit of a spoof on a reality show within the soap. It could have been drama's revenge on the mockumentary.
Never mind. Burnett, once a clinic fixture, made a convincing job of appearing to be just the slightly sheepish, self-deprecating everyguy that we believed Nick to be.
"I eat the wrong food and I'm a lazy bastard," he confessed sadly to camera.
And Burnett was no more able to stand up to the shrewish personal trainer Leanne, than Nick ever managed to quash the nagging Waverley or any of the females who used to run rings around him on the Street.
The people who wrote him out of the script ignored the appeal of Burnett at their peril. Like the rather more athletic late Sir Ed Hillary, you get the feeling Burnett is going to endure as a paragon of Kiwi down-to-earth humility.
He shook his fat belly, complete with stretch-marks, for the cameras like a real trouper. And took all the humiliations like a man. Made those impulsive promises we knew he probably couldn't keep.
Like all soap villains, the episode had to have the bitch we love to hate, in this case in the form of the blond sergeant major, with her loud and tiresome mantra to "dig deep".
It made you wish Burnett really would dig deep - about six feet - and bury the shrewish personal trainer in it. With the canny insight that could only be honed with years of soap-ery, Burnett knew who we would be rooting for.
Who could blame him for standing the trainer up that early morning on the beach?
