One ring to bring them all the hype

By MICHELE HEWITSON


At two and a half hours, give or take a few minutes for some boring stuff called news, those "Ringsnuts" who sat through TV One's extended coverage of the world premiere of The Return of the King might well have regarded it as a training run.

The film is more than three hours long. The hype felt much longer.

Holmes was at his inimitable best and at his gushing worst.

At his best he was on the red carpet getting Gollum to do Precious-speak. "Do you always spit so much?"

At his worst, to Liv Tyler, going on ad nauseam about how beautiful and elegant and radiant she looked.

There was a lot of that carry-on. Kate Hawkesby and Francis Hooper of World did the fashion stuff which Holmes nicely described as going to "further perspectives on what people are wearing".

Hawkesby: "It's just too exciting for words."

It's not every day you'd want to come up with words to describe the Prime Minister wearing chain mail.

Between them Hawkesby and Hooper managed "bootylicious" and, for Orlando Bloom "total spunkorama".

Holmes reminded us at the end of the marathon that the guy responsible for all of this was one J.R.R. Tolkien, who "developed five full new languages".

If he was alive today he would be working in television.

There were speeches which felt like they were two and a half hours long.

There were those interviews on the red carpet, in between which Holmes valiantly filled in the gaps with little "factoids". Did you want to know how much of the budget was spent on coffee?

But much of what he did say - on what was a very long day at 7pm - was that there was a sense "of the great drama being over", was very good telly which made you feel envious about not being at the party. Which was rather the point.

But the aftermath, should you have managed to stick it out, was like the conversation the day after the party: A quietly conducted, contemplative interview with the star of the show, Peter Jackson. In English.