Diana Wichtel takes a look at breakfast television

Diana Wichtel discusses the familiarity and comfort of breakfast television. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Diana Wichtel discusses the rhythms of breakfast television.

Cruising from couch to desk to couch. The coffee, the dad jokes, the random observations, the occasional rant. The rhythms of breakfast television are not unlike those at our place. It’s designed that way: familiar, unthreatening, so comfortable that sometimes you barely realise you’ve switched on the set.

Still, after the traditional long, sunny holiday doze, it’s good to wake up, smell the coffee and a whiff of current affairs in the morning. TVNZ’s Breakfast made it back a week before Three’s The AM Show, and that worked well. Two lots of first-day-back-at-school awkward banter on one morning would have been a lot.

Three hours of television to fill. Even a practised hand like Lloyd Burr looked nervous on his first outing replacing Ryan Bridge on AM. “Ryan was a bit mean to me over the years but I’m positive we’re going to have a good relationship,” declared newsreader Nicky Styris. “She doesn’t want me to call her Nanna,” Burr mused. Could he make it worse? “You’re a yummy granny,” he blurted. The opportunity for car-crash television has always been part of the breakfast game.

Over on Breakfast Anna Burns-Francis and everyone else was giving Daniel Faitaua a hard time over his rant about pedestrians failing to keep left. “Left, left,” he apparently orders errant perfect strangers in the street.

Well, these are tense times. So it’s possibly fitting that the word “divisive” has been heard so many times this year as to almost drain the word of any meaning. On Auckland’s Anniversary Day, Act’s Treaty Principles Bill was on the morning agenda on both shows and the question of whether this clearly divisive bill is divisive was proving … divisive.

“David Seymour rejects claims he is being divisive,” reported AM. Labour’s Willie Jackson has declared the bill “probably the most divisive bill of the last generation”. David Seymour: “It’s not divisive.” Christopher Luxon has called it “divisive and unhelpful”.

On the Breakfast panel, Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said of Seymour, “He wants us to be more divided. That’s why he’s moving to eradicate 50 years of jurisprudence.” The Waitangi Tribunal was created in 1975.

Seymour has spoken endlessly throughout the discussion on his bill about the need for a conversation. On Anniversary Day he was on the couch on the The AM Show with Chlöe Swarbrick. Burr took the opportunity to ask why he had missed two significant, timely opportunities to talk and to listen. “If you’re so keen for a conversation, why did you not go to Rātana or Tūrangawaewae where they were having this conversation?” Seymour said he was going to Waitangi. Due for another car crash, Burr motored on recklessly, “Are you worried about being lynched at Waitangi?” Cue a telling-off from Swarbrick and Seymour on his language. “I’m sorry,” said Burr. “Are you worried about Waitangi?”

He said he was not. Seymour remained unclouded by doubt about the complexity involved in legislating for new principles that effectively write over our founding document, eradicating, as Debbie Ngarewa-Packer put it on Breakfast, “50 years of jurisprudence”. On AM Seymour pointed out we haven’t seen the final draft of the bill. A leaked Ministry of Justice report has warned Act’s policy is “not supported by either the spirit of the Treaty or the text of the Treaty”. Christopher Luxon has said National has no intention of supporting the bill beyond the first reading. He has also declined to rule it out.

When Lloyd Burr introduced Seymour on AM he referred to the Act leader’s January 28 State of the Nation speech. It concluded, said Burr, that we are “divided, dysfunctional and at risk of losing our First World status”. Seymour smiled serenely. It called to mind Christopher Luxon’s blithe comment of last year about our “very negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country”. A country is its people. Some of our leaders don’t seem to think much of us.