Extent of loss comes home

By GREG DIXON

As those poor buggers from Team New Zealand cut the remains of the rig off their wounded boat in the choppy Hauraki Gulf on Friday, the race commentators were heard to lament his name.

Sir Peter Blake. What might have been the outcome of New Zealand's defence of the America's Cup if that late, great sailor had once again helmed this country's syndicate? Could he have prevented such disaster?

It's a tantalising question in the face of the unmitigated disaster that has been Team New Zealand's defence. And it's something worth keeping in mind as you sit down to watch tonight's DNZ special, Sir Peter Blake, The Boy From Bayswater (8.30, TV One).

The 90-minute documentary is pure tribute to the sailor, adventurer and environmentalist who was murdered while on a save-the-planet mission to the Amazon River in December 2001.

If its timing is a little off - surely TVNZ should have screened it last December to mark the anniversary of his death? - it does add to what its independent producer and director Chas Toogood admits is a story well-known to most New Zealanders

"When I was asked [by TVNZ] to make it, I thought, there's been so much television time on Peter ... it's really all been said. Although this is sort of a memorial piece, a tribute to his achievements, but still so much of it has been said."

Toogood chose to let those who knew Blake best tell his story without - and this has proved a wise move - narration. His wife Pippa and their children, his mother and siblings and many of those who sailed with or sponsored Blake throughout his sailing life appear and yarn, including Sir Tom Clark, former head of Ceramco, and Douglas Myers, Lion Nathan's former long-serving chief.

Predictably enough, Russell Coutts is absent.

"I thought it through and decided the best people to tell that story would be the people who were there: his family, friends, the people he'd sailed with could probably give a different texture or a different angle on the story we've heard so many times before.

"I didn't want [a voiceover]. I just find writing scripts for someone like Peter ... why write a script about someone when others, who knew him a lot better than I ever could, can tell a much better story?"

The finished work takes us through Blake's odyssey chronologically, from his youthful messing about in boats to his four attempts and one win in the Whitbread round-the-world races to his record non-stop circumnavigation and his work in capturing and then defending the America's Cup. And then there is the Amazon.

The documentary doesn't dwell too heavily on the acrimonious goings on inside Team New Zealand in 2000 when Coutts, Brad Butterworth and others left us in the lurch.

With just 67 minutes of actual television time to tell such a big yarn, Toogood decided to cover only the personal impact of those events on Blake.

"From Peter's point of view we just had to show that it affected him. I never knew that he'd asked to go. I didn't know that he was so upset by it that he said, 'I'll leave and these guys can do it'."

And then of course, and with Friday's disaster still in mind, the documentary allows the viewer to consider what might have been.

"What I hope people get out of this is to remember what this guy was and what he did, and the tragedy of what he could have done if he went on to live into his 80s. Peter had so much potential, when you think of Ed Hillary. You can't really put a measure on [the impact of his death] because you don't know what he might have gone on to do."