Crusading for the little guy

By FRANCES GRANT

When Kevin Milne joined the Fair Go team in 1984 a helpful colleague pointed out that the consumer rights show, then into its eighth year, must surely be nearing the end of its run.

"They'll can it as soon as you join it," Milne quotes his colleague warning him. "And I remember thinking, 'That's not a bad point."'

Fair Go producer of the time Shaun Brown also thought it was touch and go - a story the now general manager of TV One likes to tell against himself, says Milne. "He recommended the show be canned. It took off after that."

Twenty-five years after it started - more than 18 after Milne joined - Fair Go is still going strong and showing no signs of relinquishing the battle for the rights of the little guy, fighting the wide boys and rip-off merchants.

Tonight the country's second-longest-running TV show (Country Calendar takes senior honours) marks its silver anniversary with an hour-long programme looking back over its 25 years on air, decade by decade.

Guests include original presenter Brian Edwards and another famous Fair Go frontman from the 80s, Philip Alpers.

"Brian Edwards takes me through the setting up of the show and some of the things that made it revolutionary at the time," says Milne.

When Fair Go started in 1977, the team made some radical decisions. "They decided it would name names, which was seldom done at the time, that it wouldn't take complaints from anonymous people.

"And it broke ground to have humour square in the middle of serious journalism."

Tonight's nostalgia footage will include some of those lighter moments.

In the 80s, under Alpers, Fair Go took a more investigative turn, says Milne. "It was more getting faces on air, to follow them [the show's targets] up over fences and get cameras in their face, and to take on bigger issues."

That decade marked some of the show's biggest stories, says Milne, "the wet Weetbix cladding, Toyota rust, Maxicrop, which became a 52-week defamation case". In the mid-80s reporter Anna Kenna took on the law society "over a guy who had been ripped off by a lawyer" - an unprecedented move against a professional body that had seemed untouchable.

In the 90s the show scored some of its biggest payouts on behalf of the wronged and also expanded its season to the full year. Challenges to its turf from the likes of Holmes and secret-camera consumer show Target have had no effect on the number of complaints Fair Go receives, says Milne.

"It just shows there's easily enough consumer affairs stories to go around. We have had 100,000 letters in the past decade alone."

Tonight's special will also include a farewell to co-presenter and long-time Fair Go reporter Anna Thomas, says Milne. But the show will not be all nostalgia and goodbyes. This year it freshens up with a new set and extends its coverage.

Vicki Wilkinson-Baker (Holmes) joins as a reporter in Christchurch, so "we'll be doing South Island stories", says Milne. Southern con men and shysters be warned.

"We want to stress, as we go into another 25 years, that we are still there for people and we're on their side," he says. "We're battling for you."

The Fair Go special won't be all self-congratulation, however. In the interests of balance, Consumers Institute head David Russell will conduct a critical assessment of its performance as a TV consumer rights show, and some of the trades and people who have been hardest hit by the show have been invited back to have their say.

* Fair Go, TV One, 7.30pm