Paddy Gower has issues, current affairs and clowns - Diana Wichtel

Paddy Gower Has Issues - right down to his mug. Photo / Discovery

OPINION

The good, the bad, the oh my giddy aunt. There was once a local show called Rock Around the Clock. It was 1981, when Brideshead Revisited played in primetime, free to air. Or you could watch Rock, with Paul Holmes in Lurex playing fictional compere Wonderful Wally Watson, and hear a character called Bodgy (the great Marshall Napier), introduce the show: “So much television these days seems to be aimed at the most mediocre intelligence. This is the programme that’s going to change all that. This one’s aimed at total morons.”

Classic. Even then it was best to manage expectations. From the sample on NZ on Screen, featuring Tom Sharplin and Dalvanius Prime, Rock was fun, with comic interludes should even a tribute to the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll strain concentration spans.

In some ways little has changed. Early evening current affairs shows – Seven Sharp, The Project – include loads of laughs lest things get too serious. Now there is Three’s Paddy Gower Has Issues. We know he has issues. We’ve seen him bare his soul in gonzo style, stoned on Paddy Gower: On Weed, trolleyed on Paddy Gower: On Booze.

These days Paddy Gower is sober, though the new show isn’t. It comes equipped with so many preemptive comedians the set should have three rings. Still, they’re good. Karen O’Leary, Eli Matthewson, Courtney Dawson … If they haul in viewers for a show with weighty aims – to investigate big issues and produce results – then send in the clowns.

Eli Matthewson, Karen O'Leary and Courtney Dawson join Paddy Gower on his show. Photo / Warner Bros Discovery

I was definitely there for the first episode, which mounted an assault on what’s gone wrong with the teaching of literacy in this country. Newshub’s Laura Tupou reported while Paddy held court in the studio, with bad news about our children’s reading levels: “We actually suck.” His delivery is in the blokey style - a weird post-Jacinda over-correction? - currently having a revival thanks to such characters as Prime Minister Chippy from the Hutt with his sausage rolls and Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty with his, “Here’s the guts of it.”

The guts of the reading debate, as framed here, pits balanced literacy – using context, looking for cues in the book’s pictures to make sense of unfamiliar words – against structured literacy – using sounds and groups of sounds to decode a word. It’s what we used to call “sounding it out”. According to Issues, around 40 per cent of schools teach the balanced method.

Gower interviewed Education Minister Jan Tinetti, who agreed that evidence supports a switch from balanced literacy to structured literacy. Would she issue a ministerial directive to that effect if necessary? Tinetti indicated she would. “Result!” declared Gower.

Things are never quite that simple. When I taught 6-year-olds in the 70s, phonics was still taught. Though it wasn’t either/or. Sounding out and breaking up compound words like “beachball” into more digestible components was a strong part of the mix. Context and cues were there, too. Children had different learning styles. I threw everything I had at the task.

The show made an admirably succinct case for structured literacy, but you wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater in a rigid “back to basics” headrush, something we, an impatient small nation, seem prone to do.

Tinetti emphasised the need to “bring the sector with us”. One thing my teaching days taught me was that the support and respect teachers receive impacts directly on results when doing the most challenging and rewarding job I have ever had. It was also an exhausting, poorly paid and often reviled profession. A lot of us left.

In Issues’ light relief, O’Leary managed to rid Countdown supermarkets of its apparently depressing playlist of Adele break-up songs. Result!

I’ve always enjoyed Gower’s chaotic onscreen energy. So far it seems put to good use here. Though his Holmes-inspired sign off: “I’m Paddy Gower. Those were my issues, I’m gonna miss youse” may have undermined any gains the episode made for literacy.

Even in our Fred Dagg-ish times, that may be a blokey bridge too far.