Diana Wichtel: Free TV is alive and kicking but far from decent

Diana Wichtel never misses TVNZ 1's The Chase hosted by Bradley Walsh and sometimes starring Shaun Wallace, aka The Dark Destroyer. Photo / The Chase

It hasn’t been much of a summer so far, but a break is a break, even when outside is battleship grey and it’s raining sideways. Things have been a bit sideways inside, too, but in a good way. Family we haven’t seen since the pre-Covid olden days are here from Canada and the US to fill all the beds in the house and a camper van parked outside. The weather held for Christmas dinner for 25, rounded off by lighting the candles for the last night of Hanukkah. Chrismukkah was marked on the deck with such an eruption of pandemic-suppressed gusto – Put up more lights! Make mine a double! - that I expected a visit from noise control and/or the bad seasonal decorations police.

New Year’s Eve was a hat-themed party at our daughter’s flat. I complied with a medley of tatty fascinators from a two-dollar shop stuck to my head. They let us in anyway. We left them to it before we turned into pumpkins, brimming with sparkling wine and uncharacteristic optimism for a future that is clearly in good hands despite everything.

The best things in life, the song goes, are free. Everything else remains wretchedly expensive. Take what has reliably been one of the best things in my life: television. Once upon a time, its riches beamed into our living room gratis, if sometimes censored. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire… Now we pay for five streaming services because each has offered something essential at some time or other amid the dross and because I have no choice. I watch, therefore I am.

It’s not sustainable. I did a thought experiment. What would happen if I only watched what is available for free? I didn’t actually do that. I’m not mad. But, at time of writing, on TVNZ+, we are watching a basic series of the British-thriller-starring-Keeley-Hawes genre, Crossfire: “A dream holiday turns to terror for Jo and her family” etc. It’s quite good. There is always something starring David Tennant. There’s a whole category devoted to “Lavish Period Dramas”. If it keeps raining, I might even watch one. Hey, it’s free.

For one of those thrillers starring a sinister minimalist home designed by an architect with a taste for lethal staircases, there’s ThreeNow’s Finding Alice (Keeley Hawes, again).

Guilty pleasures? Absolutely. A clutch of Freeview channels feature shows about people looking for the perfect house or making over an imperfect one, a wish-fulfilment fantasy that for some reason resonates time-wastingly with me. Free channels Bravo and HGTV offer variations from the love-it-or-run-away-screaming extremes: Hoarders, Ugliest House in America and You Live in What?

There is always a certain anthropological interest involved. Americans tend to be obsessed with crown mouldings, grand staircases, and open concept and have bewilderingly bad taste in their giant granite bench tops. Brits may think they want to buy a place in Lanzarote, but A Place in the Sun is here to tell them that they don’t, not really.

Appointment viewing the old-school way is over, people say. Not until TVNZ 1 stops stripping The Chase, in which a team of hopeful punters jump valiantly through the show’s many sadistic hoops and still lose by four seconds to a “Chaser” with a dodgy nickname – The Vixen, The Dark Destroyer… It’s maddening. We never miss it.

In some ways, we’re spoilt for choice with the free stuff, from the excellent Māori Television to things that test even my high tolerance for the random trivia and trash that rules our lives. See TVNZ 2′s upcoming Treasure Island: Fans vs Faves. I may be washing my hair that night.

Still, television, even the more or less free kind, despite endless announcements over the decades of its imminent demise, is alive and fitfully kicking. We have never needed the cracked mirror it holds up to the human condition more. A decent public service broadcasting system – see examples in most of the rest of the world - would help. Just saying.