Paul Casserly: TV's best quotes - 'I'm dying of terminal cancer!'

Michael Gambon as Henry Tyson in a scene from the TV show Fortitude.

Paul Casserly rounds up the best TV quotes from February.

The 28 days of February were a mixed bag of chippies. A brief rewind would show us the furrowed brows of Dean Barker and Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul). There was the smiley wrinkle of Winston's face. And the fifty shades of Key, our glorious leader. There was the nice Mr Key mugging with Lydia Ko, and the frothing warmonger Key who left the grey scale and went directly to puce in Parliament as he called out the poofters who don't want to join him for Desert Storm 3.

You get the feeling that the entrée of ISIS videos will soon come to an end and the war will eventually be served. The familiar drums are beating, the right wing columnists are singing in unison, and the complexities of the Middle East and world affairs are being reduced to a few easy-to-digest nuggets. The word "evil" has been deployed, so that's that then. I hear that leave has been cancelled at CNN and Fox News graphics departments.

Meanwhile, in the predictable but occasionally brilliant Gallipoli (TV3), the pointlessness of fighting a foreign war on the other side of the globe at the behest of our colonial overlords is portrayed as a glorious joke. On reflection it has been a bloody awful month.

The Lundy trial became a nightly guilty pleasure on the 6pm news and death stalked the halls of The X Factor. A motelier even tried to sell the bed linen used by X Factor judges Willie Moon and Natalia Kills. They failed to sell.

Spock died. The weather was nice though. And the cricket, don't get me started.

As usual I tried to make sense of it all via the words that spewed from the telly. See if you can guess the mouths that these came from.

The quotes

1. "I hate grey areas."
2. "I have three kids at home so most people think I already spend too much time in my own bed."
3. "I'm dying of terminal cancer!"
4. "It sounded a little bit too much."
5. "Worse than being caught by your mum masturbating wearing her undies in the spare room."
6. "They'll get troops to Iraq quicker than they'll get us to Paraparam."
7. "I told them to go and buy a lotto ticket but they didn't understand me very much."
8. "My old mum used to say if you want a good night's sleep, just move to the edge of the bed and you'll drop off soon enough."
9. "Arm the Kurds, not the Iraqi government."
10. "Music for me is basically the only thing that's been there through everything, it doesn't go away."

The context

1. "I hate grey areas." Niki Lauda, on Air Crash Investigation (Nat Geo) talking about the crash of one of his Lauda Air jetliners, in which 233 people died. The motor racing legend eventually helped solve the mystery (a design fault) that caused the Boeing 767 to crash in the remote jungle near Bangkok in 1991.

2. "I have three kids at home so most people think I already spend too much time in my own bed." Black Caps captain, Brendon McCullum, at the Cricket World Cup opener when it was suggested to him that having the opening game in Christchurch must be nice for him as he can "sleep in his own bed."

3. "I'm dying of terminal cancer!" Yelled Henry Tyson, (Michael Gambon) to the bar lady of the local watering hole as a death metal band played. The woman just nodded and smiled, "ok, great." The scene was one of many superb moments from the star studded polar thriller Fortitude (Soho).

4. "It sounded a little bit too much." Said the dad of C-Rage, an X Factor NZ contestant whose rapping style was intense, to say the least. The contestants and their families are still wearing microphones as the walk out the hallway at the end of the performance, some, like a young country singer forgot this as she said. "Mel's a bitch", her mum was more switched on, "Are you still miked?"

5. "Worse than being caught by your mum masturbating wearing her undies in the spare room." Said Mike Lane of the Alternative Commentary Collective (iHeart Radio), which I had synced up via an iPad while I watched the cricket. Lane was referring to the shame felt by the English in the historic beating at the hands of the Black Caps.

6. "They'll get troops to Iraq quicker than they'll get us to Paraparam*." Said a female commuter in relation to Wellington rail delays. (3News)
*(Pakeha for Paraparaumu)

7. "I told them to go and buy a lotto ticket but they didn't understand me very much." Said a local on the scene of an accident in which four Chinese nationals ended up in a river in the South Island while still in their car but survived to tell the tale.

8. "My old mum used to say if you want a good night's sleep, just move to the edge of the bed and you'll drop off soon enough." She's back! Suzanne Paul in her new pillow-based infomercial for a pillow that promises a good night's sleep.

9. "Arm the Kurds, not the Iraqi government." A Scotsman and ex British soldier who joined up with Kurds to fight ISIS, talking on The Nation, the man, called 'Alan' was wearing a scarf around his face because "ISIS have bounties on our heads and I have family in the UK."

10. "Music for me is basically the only thing that's been there through everything, it doesn't go away." Said contestant 1495 of the X Factor NZ on the final day of the auditions. Like many on the show Shae, 29, was wheeling out a sob story to help his chances, but when he started talking about the 16-year-old that he helped kill when he was 19, he sparked the ire of friends and family of the deceased. You can imagine how hopeless these words would sound to the dead boy's loved ones: "I met some dudes and we went to a bonfire, there was a commotion ... he ended up passing away." Apologies were issued, columnists lashed out and someone even told Simon Cowell. As the saying goes: "We may be done with past, but the past ain't done with us."

- nzherald.co.nz