KEY POINTS:
The fool in a Shakespeare play is seldom a fool. Instead, he tends to be a sharp commentator using comedy to jab the egos of those too powerful to offend directly.
New Zealand has something close. It's Jeremy Wells. As host of Eating Media Lunch, he is a
quick and dangerous darkling and it is instantly clear he has sorted out his chosen prey. While he leaves the working sloggers alone, being a pseud, self-important or truly important is different. These are at risk.
His weapon is a lethal one: ridicule. Politicians know its power, keeping tough libel laws in place, drying up the funding for the likes of McPhail and Gadsby and gutting the other satirists' outlet, the student magazines.
That doesn't save them or anyone else. Wells lives off available video, and there is a lot of it. What's then required is a blackhearted ability to recognise what sits there for the taking. This is present.
John Campbell doubtless came to regret letting his enthusiasm run out of control, both outside the court when David Bain was freed and in the studio when he struggled to get himself past the word "remarkable".
With help from some coldblooded editing, Wells, adopting a tone of faux-outrage at the "shocking" events of 2007, had Dancing with the Stars for rich, thick nourishment. Paul Holmes featured in much of the chosen footage, some of it in wounding slow motion.
Wells was not finished with high- profile dancers. He segued into Rodney Hide's Agenda appearance, when politics were shoved aside. A startled interviewer was left unsure what to make of a lengthy rumination on the benefits of ballroom dancing.
While the media fizz over David Bain's release and Dancing would be enough to see anyone through a half hour, Wells had more, so much more. He took a flick at the police. There was Christine Rankin's establishing the blame for child abuse. The subsequent celebrity-laden silent vigil was irresistible to Wells and his camera crew. In a moment reaching back to his Newsboy days with Mikey Havoc, when he was as much of the story as the story itself, he utterly destroyed it.
John Key may have cause for reflection. The footage of him outside the White House fence, looking more tourist than statesmen, may come back to embarrass him. Also, Key's corralling an unhappy non-Maori-speaking Maori teenager for his Waitangi Day appearance is probably something he may wish disappeared.
Eating Media Lunch is not equal-opportunity television. It is less a look across the social and political landscape than a treatment of it as a free-fire zone, a theatre of cruelty where Wells always has the last word.
With journalists renowned for rushing to the lawyer at the first serious hint of a counter-strike, it will be interesting to see what happens if Wells and his show ever come under serious fire.
Until then we have the wicked, dark and guilty thrill that is Eating Media Lunch.
Eating Media Lunch, TV2, 10.00pm
