Mixed emotions

By Michele Hewitson

You know you have New Zealand on air when a character on the box says: "You've got a real chance of making the Silver Ferns, but you've got to stop dreaming about boys."

You know you've got the South Pacific on air when a character offers this term of endearment: "Hello my little hibiscus flower."

But you'll have to turn the telly on either early (Sunday, TV One at 10.15 am) to watch Matou Uma and The Overstayer, or late (Matou Uma will be repeated at about 11 pm on December 19 and The Overstayer at 10.30 pm on Boxing Day.)

The Tala Pasifika Production house, which made both short dramas, is not complaining too loudly. They have settled for the public - and politic - response: they're just pleased to be getting the air time. Director Justine Simei-Barton says "it's not an ideal time slot-and I think it's unfortunate that most Pacific Island and Maori programmes get ghettoised. Having said that, we've got to be happy about getting any screen time at all."

Kathy Wright, assistant programmer at TV One, says that "it's a difficult one with those sorts of programmes because you're not sure how broad the audience is going to be."

But the early and late night time-slots are no reflection on the Pacific Island content of the dramas. "Not at all," she says. "It's just because of the nature of them being one-off and half-hour."

The proof that drama of this sort deserves a place nearer prime time will, Simei-Barton says, be in the watching.

"The hope is that when people see these dramas the networks will realise there is a huge market out there. The dramas are about Pacific Islanders but they're targeted for a very broad mass audience. We need to prove ourselves and I think we'll do that quite successfully."

In the meantime, set the video. Matou Uma (written by Aiga Vagana and directed by Simei-Barton, who has spent 12 years honing her in live theatre) offers a clever twist on the "it's only a game" interpretation of the meaning of life in Godzone.

The game is netball, and if the team doesn't win the semi-final there's more than this particular game at stake: "They'll think we're a bunch of lazy coconuts."

It's also a candid look at the issues faced by young women struggling to express their sexuality under the sometimes steely eyes of church and family.

There's little that's preachy about Matou Uma though, mostly because it's delivered (for the most part) via a writer and actors (Betty-Anne Monga, Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell, Tausili Mose) whose ears are tuned to the way people really talk.

Simei-Barton says the two dramas (six were proposed but only two received New Zealand On Air funding) were intensively workshopped over 10 months. It was, she says, "very much a theatre process workshop style - we got the writers to become actors."

The Overstayer, written by Ene Petaia and also directed by Simei-Barton, is the story of a Samoan/Palangi couple living in the shadow of the immigration policies and dawn raids of the early 1970s.

The writer, Simei-Barton says, "felt that the policies certainly affected the Pacific Island community, but not all of us are married to Pacific Islanders. It also affected Palangis as well and to a large extent it was a lot harder for people in mixed marriages.

"If the Pacific Island partner was sent away the family infrastructure was cut in two. A lot of Palangis didn't have the wide network of family support. It was such a radical thing to have done at the time [to marry into the Pacific Island community.] The lead female character in The Overstayer (Sarah Smuts-Kennedy) has only her mum, who wasn't happy about the relationship anyway."

Mum is played by Elizabeth McRae who, as mother of the bride, is the very figure of a 70s matron in what takes the prize for the worst hat ever seen on television. There's a lovely scene where she offers the groom's aunty the bride and groom figures she saved from her own wedding cake. Without missing a beat, Aunty (Juliana Manusina) takes the male figure, says "I'd better paint the boy," and dips the tiny, pink-faced figure in chocolate.

Matou Uma and The Overstayer paint two pictures worth seeing: one of what we look like today, the other of what we looked like then.

You could well argue that they're both more truly fly-on-the-wall than any of the "reality" series which gobble up prime time television.

They're about showing us who we are, Simei-Barton says. We need to see images of ourselves as a multi-cultural society. "We live as neighbours and friends, quite a lot of us have contacts with ethnic minorities - and yet we don't know each other."

What: Matou Uma and The Overstayer

When: Sunday, 10.15am

Where: TV One