KEY POINTS:
Reality producers fretting their footage lacks the necessary voltage are wont to ramp up the narration. This tends to be in two versions.
There is the deep and grave Voice of Doom, or a breathless, pumped, and high-speed excitement.
Either way, there is confusion, at being told all is ripping and thrilling when the images on screen are dully pedestrian.
The makers of Rapid Response and Border Security needn't worry. Both have enough action to be able to spare some for other, deprived, producers.
This also lets the narrators keep it mercifully matter of fact.
Rapid Response tracks local paramedics driving out to deal with the strange, sad, frightening and occasionally violent.
This reviewer had nine years as an ambulance officer in Auckland, much of it on the front line, including suffering a twisted ankle slipping on the blood across an ambulance's floor and wrestling with a deranged meth user trying to kill anyone near him.
Believe it, this show is real.
Indeed, a certain amount of discretion has been applied.
Things can turn a great deal wilder than anything the makers have let out of the editing suite.
The soft guiding hand of the public relations department is also felt.
The staff's comments are safely cleansed of the bleak, coping humour pervading all the emergency services.
While we have a few too many establishing shots of the flashing lights and hear the siren a tad more often than is essential, the makers do step things along, with collapses in the street, accidents, some of them appalling, and discovering exactly what bad driving does to the human body.
Because this is television, which, unlike the movies, does not do stillness well, the blight of all the emergency services, the down time between calls, with plenty of time for annoyances to surface, is largely skipped.
Instead, the show amounts to a recruiting poster for those looking to flee the chalkface, screen face and other work-faces for a career offering almost everything, including being caring in a world where lightning bolt-like adrenaline surges are daily and de rigueur.
Across the Tasman, Border Security's Customs officers look up from their Sydney airport desks at a high percentage of the 20,000 people arriving each day.
They have only their technology, skill, training and instincts between them and being over-run with drugs, poison, disease, and anything else a country doesn't want. They also know they are barely holding the line.
They deal with a nigh-unbelievable range of problems.
There was the Afghan couple unsure of the Australian cuisine and not wanting to risk starvation.
They'd packed a supply of dried goat meat.
One young man sweated too much. A close look at his baggage turned up around $10 million worth of cocaine, a bad choice for a non-English speaker facing 10 years in an Aussie prison.
Earlier in the season each half of a couple quietly informed Customs officials the other was a criminal and needed to be jailed - now!
Each wanted to lose the other at the airport, for a holiday uninterrupted by the domestic strife that had flared on the plane.
While the Customs staff and the paramedics are a Tasman Sea apart and trying to save different things, lives or a country, they will surely say the same thing.
Who needs fiction when you have a day at our office?
