Powerpoint: For art's sake

By MICHELE HEWITSON

When Helen Clark took over the leadership of the country and the arts portfolio, the arts community popped the corks. It wasn't just the promise of more money for the Creative New Zealand coffers that had them raising glasses at the galleries and smirking from the stage wings.

It was the idea that the most high-profile woman in New Zealand (other than Xena) was giving gravitas to New Zealand's perennially struggling artists by taking a personal interest.

Almost a year into her first term it couldn't have gone more badly wrong — at least for those of us who like to do at least a percentage of our art perusal from the couch.

When Bill Ralston's Backch@t was given the backslap of being told TVNZ didn't want it back for a fourth year, the annoyed host came out to say that the support of the show from the Prime Minister and her Broadcasting Minister, Marian Hobbs, had been the kiss of death.

The fairy godmother had turned undertaker. Who knows what really went wrong? Ralston went on to say that the canning was the first casualty in a tetchy relationship between a commercially driven broadcaster and a Government with a public service agenda.

And presenters who get into fisticuffs with executives from the company which screens their show can quite possibly not expect a shelf life as long as a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth Judy Bailey.

TVNZ, predictably — and cannily, given that call for public service telly — says it wants to move the arts into primetime, that Backch@t was never going to be the show to hold a primetime audience.

At which point the fairy godmother turned humble viewer. "Just as a Humble Viewer," the PM has said she reckons Backch@t would have done just fine in the slot. Humble Viewer and I are in accord on this one.

If you can create a primetime audience for a show about "canine challenges" (Super Dog Challenge) surely you can create one for a show about people, which is what artists generally tend to be.

TVNZ has evoked the dreaded words "broad audience appeal" which is enough to give Humble Viewer (I'm sure) and me the heaving vapours.

We already know what broad audience appeal means when applied to the arts. It means shows like Bookenz where people like that Muck-in-a-minute woman appear in a soundbite to tell us what they've been reading.

It means shows like the Chicken Noodle Networks Art-Rageous where they get some boppy bint to travel the art world in search of the trivial and the wacky.

Do such shows constitute wider audience appeal? People who don't have any interest in the arts will turn off with a shudder — who wants to be talked to like an imbecile? You get enough of that watching the six o'clock news.

Those of us who do switch on the television occasionally in primetime, which means the odd occasion when there is not some reality/survival/makeover-your-roses show on, would have been more than happy to make a date with Ralston earlier in the evening, given the chance.

In the meantime, while TVNZ sifts through the proposals from production companies for the brave new world of primetime arts, we'd settle for re-runs of The Southbank Show.

But Humble Viewer has warned that TVNZ will have to come up will something better that Backch@t.

All the rest of us can do is hope that that's not a red rag to a broadcaster. Changing Pictures, anyone?