KEY POINTS:
Paul Holmes left TVNZ in 2005 and took his name out the door with him. Holmes, the show, ended and Close Up took over. First it was Sue Wood and now Mark Sainsbury hosting.
The name is hardly the only change. While Sainsbury fronts both the ads and the show, with Paul Henry on the reserves bench, there's no "Sainsbury" in the title.
Instead there is a relentless emphasis on "we" and on the quality of the journalism. It's about the team.
That's a big step away from Holmes, which was personality drenched and owed much to the New Zealand-born and adopted-Australian Derryn Hinch's self-named show.
Both were host-driven, with the front man doing all interviews. Stories lived or died on their urgency, immediacy and potential for unleashing emotion.
Any emotion would do so long as the camera caught it. Holmes began and ended with us watching men march out the door, starting with Dennis Conner, and 16 years later it was Holmes tucking an advertising banner under his arm and going.
Close Up's producers seemed to have opened another door, one taking them back 16 years before Holmes, to a softer Town and Around style, with the twinkling-eye'd hosts and occasional gloriously effective hoaxes (the 1960s turkey farmer and his birds' gumboots have become a key stop on television's nostalgia tour).
Sainsbury has the rich hint of Town and Around humour running in an avuncular presence. On Thursday night he needed it. A piece on why men should have regular prostate checks had a male reporter undergo a full examination, live and on screen.
Mercifully, the viewer's worst fears were not realised, with the camera remaining on the barely flinching journalist's face.
Other items across Thursday and Friday nights brought us a friendly dolphin, an art prodigy, surprises in what foods are good for us, and another next Peter Jackson.
An item on the Facebook networking site lit up the difference between present and past.
After a run-through of how Facebook works we had its benefits; a university uses it to network new students, hoping to soften the anxiety of arriving at the institution. Tacked on the end was a caution. The site has real potential to be a stalker's friend.
In times gone, that "stalker danger" angle would have strode free and clear of everything else.
Here it lay where it fell. This won't do in a New York, London or Los Angeles newsroom.
Here, the downplaying meshed neatly with a New Zealand self-image of sensible and good-humoured people doing just fine in the big wide world.
That theme continues into the sponsorship arrangements.
No flashy cars or trendy, high living here - the current sponsor is the Public Trust.
* Close Up, One, week nights, 7pm
