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The telly viewing doldrums have been less intense this holiday season, with the channels interrupting normal programming for only a week or so to ply us with their uninspiring festive line-ups.
For some of us it takes only a week or two of old family movie reruns, or (sorry cricket fans) that endless smack of leather on willow, to trigger the great summer switch-off. So hard was it to get off the beach and back tuning in - that plague of ads for Christmas hampers doesn't help - that I even missed an episode of the Glenn Close thriller Damages, one of the most compelling shows on the box.
But even this quality thriller has had to bang on a bit to fill out its 13 episodes, with so many double-crosses they look in danger of cancelling each other out. Last week, a follower of the show informs me, I missed another sizzling turn from Ted Danson, as his character billionaire Arthur Frobisher underwent coaching for a possible court trial. While Close plays yet another hard-faced bitch, it's hard to take your eyes off Danson. The former sitcom actor's turn as the corrupt billionaire with a well-cultivated facade of chilled-out caring and sharing is the real revelation of the piece.
However, the prospect of Hermione Norris, the new Brit queen of mean, tackling the old psychopathic femme fatale role was enough to lure me back to watch this week's Sunday Theatre, The Kindness of Strangers.
Whereas Close would make a meal of all that menace, Norris played it wonderfully cool in Sunday night's first half, with merely a hint of evil allowed to flicker through all that blond benevolence as her sad and lonely character inveigled her way into another family's nest. Her performance as Fiona Charters lifted this above its predictable nuclear-family-nightmare plot.
And the show contained another unlooked for bonus, the promo to Jeremy Wells' Unauthorised History of New Zealand, the religious episode: Those wishing to be offended should tune in at 9.55pm.
What canny advertising. As we know, there's nothing like potential offensiveness for upping your ratings.
It seems a lesson the outraged never learn, despite all that experience with the likes of South Park, or the Virgin in a Condom: protest loudly and grow the audience exponentially as everyone flocks to see what the fuss is about.
Wells was certainly trying hard to lure 'em in, with an equal opportunity go at the phenomenon with a penchant for tall buildings and tall stories. Nothing from Maori mythology to the Destiny Church escaped his searing probe into the nation's nuttier religious leanings, neatly undermined with the observation that most of the tenants of Godzone were not terribly interested in their landlord.
The show has always relied largely on archival footage of Kiwis at their most naff; now it mocks up footage to merge seamlessly into the mix. Most hilarious? An item on the nuns who mistakenly put the Shroud of Turin into a hot wash with the convent sheets: The stain came out.
The Mormons took a drubbing for their door-knocking habits. And that Popemobile, knocked up on the tray of a Mitsubishi ute, really should have been preserved as a Kiwi DIY classic. But even more frightening than the nation's history of divine madness, is Wells' own ardour to embrace our gauche past.
So deeply embedded does he appear in the image of Kiwi male circa 1972, that he can't take the polyester kneesocks off, even for a silly bonking scene in bed. You fear he may never emerge back into the 21st century. It could be a condition of extreme retro irony taking hostage of a man's soul: call it Walksocks Syndrome.
