TV Eye: Too rich a diet

Thank you, TVNZ, for cutting off The Sopranos in the prime of its new, long-awaited season. Apparently, in its concern that we not suffer from a surfeit of quality drama, TV2 has determined that because of a hold-up in filming the final season in the United States, we should have fewer episodes now so we can have more after another long wait - a view you can't help comparing to the addled reasoning of the dementia-suffering Uncle Junior.

What's more, it is thoughtfully giving us a double episode finale of Big Love - which also seems to have been and gone quicker than you can say "polygamy is illegal in Utah" - to wrap up the two best shows on the box on the same night. And thus bringing to an end the rare experience of having one night of the week which felt like stay-at-home, essential viewing.

Why doesn't TV2 play the Sopranos episodes it has now, and repeat them before the final episodes next year? But no, viewers must not be allowed too rich a diet of decent telly, or they might not be able to digest the rubbish more usually on offer.

So it's back to non-essential watching, although TV One did its best to persuade us that if we didn't partake of its Test the Nation health quiz on Monday we would expire there and then on the couch. Unfortunately, the show suffered from precisely the problem it was trying to eradicate.

Talk about clogged arteries, this was as fat-laden as it comes, plumping out its meagre 40 quiz questions to a three-hour extravaganza. That's a couch-potato marathon in anyone's book, yet here was Allison Roe warning us, "If we don't exercise, we atrophy and that not's a good look."

An awful lot of it seemed to consist of the teams cheering themselves on in applause as mock as a can of Dairy Whip, roving funny man Leigh Hart indulging in some inexplicable bouts of cut-rate slapstick, and Wendy Petrie hopping around the audience bailing them up with such unintentionally funny questions as asking Kevin Milne: "What made you think you were like Bill Clinton?"

This was possibly the longest public service message ever on New Zealand television, dressed up as a quiz, in case you hadn't got the eat better and exercise message from the hordes of diet shows already cluttering the box.

Meanwhile over on C4, the music channel is trying to round out its mono-diet with such offerings as Studentville, a show which reminds us how little yoof telly we've had lately. It has its Jackass aspect but is not without its pleasures, such as the mocking tones of pomposity and a gratifying bit of jeering at Auckland, "where the students above all else pursue vanity".

Vain hopes all round. Watching drunken students trying to convince themselves they're having the time of their lives is a laugh in itself. Were the blokes getting any action at the toga party? "A helluva lot," assured one, after a pause just long enough to sound entirely unconvincing.

There are some great lines in there, such as the earnest media studies student who was described as "a living monument to Palmy North's awesomeness".

Still, we can rest assured students all round the country are working hard at learning to drink themselves silly. The drinking facility is essential to the skill set, equipping the young for the rigours, disappointments and sheer tedium of working life. As Roe might say, if you don't exercise, it will atrophy.