KEY POINTS:
After the death of Sir Edmund Hillary, a single theme emerged. It was that someone special was gone, and it did not matter in which country the loss happened.
That's a level of celebrity able to bend people to its will. Hillary never budged, ending as he began, blunt, determined, and gruffly honest.
The title of TVNZ's Remembering Ed - a tribute to Sir Edmund Hillary on TV One last night at 7.30 got the tone and the man right, in letting the portrait of him emerge through other people's recollections.
Short cameos from Neil Finn and Peter Jackson bookended the piece. The clip from the Jackson horror movie was the only wrong note. It jarred and should have been lost.
Remembering Hillary were his family, minus his second wife, June. There were mountaineers and Nepalese, caught up in his determination to build schools and a hospital.
Tom Scott directed and narrated, dual roles that can allow egos to dance free. Scott did give us the life-changing impact of Hillary's energy and honesty, a balance to the professional cynicism of cartooning and political commentating. From there he kept the rhetoric chained down and himself largely offstage.
It was near impossible not to know Hillary was first to climb Mt Everest. Equally, there was awareness he worked with the Nepalese. I am not sure if everyone knew the extent of this. I certainly didn't.
Scott kept the emphasis on the medical, education, and conservation infrastructures Hillary drove into existence high in Nepal's mountains.
The hospitals and the schools do what Hillary hoped, function efficiently and well, with his name nowhere on any of them. An attempt by Graeme Dingle to name a hospital after him was met by Hillary wielding a paintbrush to remove his name.
Some excellent photography caught Nepal perfectly. It is a hard place, misty, cold, inhospitable, one for the pragmatic and hardy. Elegance and flamboyant style don't play well. Hillary, not considered a technically skilled climber, but who used strength and focus, was a perfect fit.
Later, that strength failed him, when his mind made an appointment to climb faster and higher than his body could. It nearly killed him. It was the end of his mountaineering.
This was no pious hagiography. We saw the realisation mountaineering was over hit him hard. It came while the depression after the plane crash that killed his daughter and first wife still consumed him.
It took a long time to recover. The Nepalese braced for him to leave, never to return. But, this was Sir Edmund Hillary. We were given film of the moment his morale was jumpstarted, a jetboat ride to Calcutta.
This programme will almost certainly surface as a DVD for sale. While it may be temporarily swamped in the coverage of Hillary's death and funeral, it is worth having, as a meditation on what a good man doing good work can achieve.
* SideSwipe will appear as usual tomorrow.
