Tom Scott examines what makes our top cartoonists tick

By GREG DIXON

I'll let you into a secret. As a print journalist, there can be nothing quite as galling - nay, wrist-slittingly depressing - as a good editorial cartoon.

This has, I assure you, nothing to do with jealousy. No, the reason is that as a reporter-writer your job entails spending days (weeks if you're truly unlucky) researching and crafting stories which you hope will explain something about something.

It may take 1000 words, it may take five times that - plus a bunch of sweat and angst - to do it.

And hardly ever will your columns of words have the same bite, the same sense of penetration and insight as a single, good cartoon on the same subject.

A cartoonist can, with an illustration and a few words, convey so more with so much less. What they do can seem almost magical. So I heartily approve of tonight's DNZ, Cartoonists Inc (8.35pm, TV One), for celebrating those who add so much to our understanding of ourselves as a society with so few of the things that dog us journos: words.

Written and presented by one of New Zealand's pre-eminent cartoonists, Tom Scott, this survey of our cartooning talent is a brief but thoughtful and entertaining sketch of how they do what they do and why.

The names Peter Bromhead, Burton Silver, Murray Ball, Garrick Tremaine, Murray Webb, Rosemary McLeod, Anthony Ellison and Trace Hodgson will be familiar to anyone who has bought a New Zealand newspaper or magazine over the past 30 years. And Scott - who obviously knows all the cartoonists - profiles them in unfussy, often funny vignettes.

But they, like he, are getting on. These guys, Scott says, are "on the dark side of 40 - all right, 50. One severe cold snap could wipe us out."

He asks where the hot new cartooning talent will come from. The street, he believes.

But his documentary is a little weak on unearthing the next generation. Although it features a couple of young cartoonists, Scott doesn't seem much interested in looking at the new frontier of tooning.

He does make the point that few young cartoonists are interested in doing political cartoons - and he includes none that is. He leaves open why the new generation isn't interested, which is slightly disappointing, though it undoubtedly has something to do with a widespread apathy about party and traditional left-right politics among young people in general.

But what makes this documentary so refreshing - though its subject is intrinsically worthy of an hour of television - is that Scott has managed to give the programme a good critical edge.

Whereas much of what screens in the DNZ slot panders hopelessly to its subject, Scott asks good hard questions of many of his fellow cartoonists.

Why is Tremaine so angry about Maori issues? Why is McLeod so savage about women's bodies? Why did Ellison strip down his style and stop skewering politicians?

The documentary gives a sense of each cartoonist's approach and what they see their job as being - entertainers, social commentators or both?

Hodgson, a genius in my book, puts it best. Political cartoonists, he says, are character assassins. And we writers can only dream of such stuff.