Michele Hewitson: Top prize for no-thrills TV

The Qantas telly awards were to be held in a spirit of togetherness, hosts Jason Gunn and Petra Bagust told us at the start. This was equal opportunity celebrity television. So we had Gunn from TVNZ, Bagust the "showpony" from TV3 and Charlotte Dawson from Prime out the back doing the interviews with the winners.

"If anything happens backstage, even if it's fisticuffs, we want to know first," said Bagust. It's hard to imagine who else would have been interested in what happened backstage, because exactly nothing happened.

Dawson got to interview Robyn Malcolm who won the Readers' Choice Award for female telly personality (personalities are only banned at TVNZ when they're on the news, apparently) and best actress.

She seemed a bit distracted but then she was about to have a baby any minute. If she'd had it that minute we might have seen some drama.

Marc Ellis won the Readers' thing for favourite bloke. He was either stunned to hear this - he was gazing off into the middle distance - or he was valiantly trying not to perve at Charlotte's impressive cleavage. I know I was having the same difficulty.

So, not a lot happening there, then. But we got to see it not happening first. It makes sense, on paper, I suppose, to televise telly awards. But this has all been attempted before and despite Charlotte's cleavage it hasn't got any less boring to watch.

Playing count the references to the long-running soap playing at TVNZ helped pass the time. Janet McIntyre said, "it's not all bad at TVNZ," an effort which came second only to Ellis' attempt.

There was a joke, by Oliver Driver, about how he was going to wear something like what Jaquie Brown was wearing but they sold it. That was a crap joke.

I do want to know, though, why Bagust changed outfits near the end. There's a crap joke in there too. There was a Woman-Yelling-at-Her-Kids joke. "It's not about ratings," said Bagust. No, you can see that it couldn't be.

Neighbours at War (TV2, Wednesdays, 9.30pm) will likely rate. It is also on the cards that there will be fisticuffs at some stage. God only knows what possesses people to go on these shows.

They shouldn't be encouraged. We've seen Ray, who likes to be known as Ray-Mow, because he runs a lawn mowing business, and his son, who have taken to drilling holes in fencing so they can rig surveillance cameras, erecting steel alloy panels on said fencing to stop the neighbours being able to see them, following the neighbour to attempt to prove that she's at the pub all day (she wasn't) and so on and on in drearily mad fashion.

The police has been involved and warned Ray to cut it out. This seems unlikely.

We also met the D'Souza family, who are from Goa, whose neighbours are from the Punjabi region. People from this region are very noisy, the D'Souzas told us. These neighbours make "unacceptable, intolerable" noise. What do they do? Well, when one of the kids goes to the toilet, he shouts something in Hindi which means "I've finished my pooh job." Also, the father has a very loud, very annoying laugh. And they have parties.

These parties are noisy because they get the pressure cooker going, and they grind spices.

These neighbours sensibly declined to appear. Shame really, I would have liked to have heard that laugh.

The telly awards might have been boring but Neighbours at War - which is what the telly types are the rest of the year - is just too depressing to watch.

Even more depressing than the fact that in this country Jason Gunn, who is cheesier than one of those cheese balls that passed for cuisine in the 70s, passes for a television celebrity.