TV: Gosh, didn't that year on Backch@t whiz by

By GILBERT WONG

At one point in tonight's repeat of the season finale of Backch@t (11.05, TV One), host Bill Ralston provides a link to film reviewer Chris Knox.

"I know it sounds bizarre, since the year's only just over halfway through, but we're going to Chris for his highlights of the year in film."

Precisely. I know the production house Gibson Group is only funded for 25 programmes, but surely something is inherently wonky in a funding and broadcast system that cuts off the state broadcaster's only in-depth arts and culture programme with five months of the year to go.

It's not as if stories and issues in the arts, media and the general culture cease in August. Though the shorter season for current affairs flagship Assignment seems to indicate that this is now part of broadcasting philosophy.

Screening at the fag-end of a Sunday night, Backch@t's timeslot consigned it automatically to a television ghetto - video-recorder land.

Yet the programme has produced a consistent series of entertaining and quirky stories that have strayed widely from the fusty definition of the arts as something only a small and elitist class of the culterati consume.

Tonight reporter Mark Chrysell talks to Christchurch sculptor Neil Dawson, whose works adorn the Olympic stadium in Homebush. As Dawson says, the fact he was selected says a lot about Australia's cultural confidence. The implication is that the reverse would spark an inevitable jingoistic hue and cry in this country.

In Jodie Ihaka's interview with expatriate film director Geoff Murphy, she asks why he came back to work on Lord of the Rings. The grouchy Murphy eventually responds, "This is home."

Because they are given time, the stories enjoy an expansiveness beyond the soundbite reportage we are usually delivered and so find a wider resonance. These are our stories and they don't appear anywhere else.

Backch@t's willingness to explore stories about the media showed how little we scrutinise what is the major influence on public discourse. It should be a legitimate area for journalism, but few media outlets are confident and willing to examine the rights and wrongs of what they do, despite a generation of young New Zealanders who have grown up with media studies and are increasingly savvy and cynical about the tricks and formulae the mass media so often rely on.

One thing Backch@t favoured was the panel discussion. But rather than relying on so-called movers and shakers like Face the Nation or Holmes, the panels favoured individuals with hands-on experience of the topic, and with Ralston as mediator, gave them time to explain their arguments.

The result was more illuminating than the theatre Holmes' talking heads usually become.

While a panel discussion on the implications of the Government's determination to introduce local content quotas is unlikely to be a ratings winner - requiring as it does scrutiny of a multitude of issues: content definition, funding, sheer practicality - it is an important topic that current affairs programming has chosen to barely touch.

Backch@t must now wait for the next New Zealand on Air funding round and negotiations with TVNZ before another season can be confirmed.

Whether the programme comes back or not will not be known until October at the earliest. Producer Gordon Harcourt remains committed to producing the programme.

But the decision will be up to TVNZ and New Zealand on Air.