Blissful but lacking Spice

By GREG DIXON

Here endeth the 90s, the decade history should deem the epoch of pop cultural grave-robbing and planned obsolescence.

It was fitting, then, that in 1999 New Zealand's entertainment landscape was blotted by the most orchestrated phenomenon we had ever seen.

TrueBliss, the sub-Spice Girls girlie group manufactured by TVNZ for its "documentary" Popstars, bespoke the ever-rising cynicism of those in the privileged position of determining what's at our entertainment buffet counter.

The selection, they always tell you, is growing.

But casting a wary (and weary) eye across the various charts and lists summing up the year at the box office, CD shop and on the box, much of that international and local selection continues to grow more bland, stodgy, saccharine or just plain cloned.

TrueBliss were a cynical, synthetic stunt, but they were not alone.

Television did the taste limbo when it showed a six-year-old boy finding out who his real daddy was on the soon abandoned TV2 show You Be The Judge.

Later in the year, with Dream Home, the same channel asked two struggling families to do up a house which might or might not be theirs by show's end.

The wireless wasn't immune either. Ratings hungry radio stations provided the country with the dubious entertainments of a couple of strangers tying the knot for a trip to Italy, a very public bid to produce a millennium baby and - on December 31 - a bloke who will snooze (with "assistance") through the big night at Napier's East Pier.

The flipside is, of course, that we continued to consume all this - and rather enthusiastically. Go figure.

Here's how the rest shaped up:

TELEVISION Pop stars and chart-toppers they might have been, but TV2's and TrueBliss' Popstars series was certainly a long, long way behind the competition - according to AC Nielsen figures the show didn't even make the year's top 100 raters.

Excluding sport, the most-watched programme of the year was (shock, horror) TV One's coverage of the royal wedding of Sophie Rhys-Jones and Prince Edward.

Fortunately, the rest of the top five was all local: Fair Go Ad Awards, This Is Your Life, One Network News and Fair Go.

The most watched programme (predictably) was a rugby game between the All Blacks and Australia on TV One.

Sport - or should we say rugby - always figured highly in the ratings for TV One.

That will not happen in 2000. The state broadcaster ended the century by losing to Sky all rights to the country's most-watched sport.

But then it wasn't a good year in PR for TVNZ. Its year began with the Richard Long debacle. Unceremoniously dumped as co-host for TV One's One Network News, to make way for TV3 ship-jumper John Hawkesby, Long was quickly back after viewers starting switching off.

But then the sands of popularity are always shifting in telly. In 1997 it was reality, in 1998 it was cooking, but in 1999 television's new black was the real-estate show.

With the success of Location, Location, Location they just seemed to breed until we had My House My Castle, Home Front and the aforementioned stunt, Dream Home (not to mention two versions of Changing Rooms).

TV3 finally broke Fair Go's monopoly on the consumer-rights show with Target - though it came with a twist.

Worthy and educational it most certainly was, but it seemed to have an unnatural interest in tradesman with an unnatural interest in women's underwear.

TV2's Jackson's Wharf, from the makers of Shortland Street, rated steadily, as did TV One's Duggan and TV2's one-off, award-winning cop drama Lawless.

The big - nay, colossal - disappointment was the seven-part costume drama, Greenstone. Years in the planning, it was dubbed historically inaccurate and - after a bit of early interest - dropped like a piece of greenstone below the top 30 programmes for the week and fell as low as 51.

Meanwhile, the Aussie-owned community network, Prime, was looking less like a repeats channel and more like an old (and good) TV One with a string of intelligent documentaries and some top-shelf Brit drama.

Paul Holmes continued to be Paul Holmes, marking his 10th year fronting his eponymous show. Oh, and he wrote a book and discovered he had cancer.

The year's biggest bummer: logging on to Nick Eynon's Website. Nightmares come true, too.

FILM You would have to be stuck under a moon rock in a galaxy far, far away to have no idea that Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace was the year's big enchilada. Topping the 1999 roster here and in most other countries, George Lucas' film-cum-economy has made $US915 million ($NZ1.8 billion) so far, and that's just at the box office.

In its dust locally was the Wachowski brothers' surprise hit The Matrix, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (which proved sequels can be better than originals), this year's blockbuster vehicle for Bruce Willis, The Sixth Sense, and, pleasingly, New Zealand's own What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted?

Horror (including the much-vaunted The Blair Witch Project) and Shakespeare (beginning with Shakespeare In Love) were very much in vogue at the cineplex this year, as were a string of somewhat variable remakes (The Mummy, The Haunting, The Thomas Crown Affair) and dodgy copies, including Jaws rip-offs Deep Blue Sea and Lake Placid.

Eyes Wide Shut, director Stanley Kubrick's last project, was a triumph for hype, but you couldn't help but suspect that having big stars getting their clobber off was the major reason for its $300 million worldwide box-office return.

And what was this thing with the name Joe - My Name Is Joe, Mighty Joe Young, Meet Joe Black - this year?

MUSIC Come On Over was what Shania Twain called the album she released last year, and the country (the world!) has accepted the invitation over and over and over again in 1999.

The result: her album has been in the New Zealand charts for 81 weeks, has gone platinum 15 times and was the biggest-selling slice of plastic in 1999. The question: why? Perhaps it was the dearth of new releases this year from the globe's established mega acts, like U2 and REM (Britpop seemed to be almost entirely missing in action).

That may have left the music market wide open for the likes of Twain and the other two teen-targeted acts which made up the country's top-three selling albums: the Latin pop of Ricky Martin and the close harmony boy group, Boyzone.

The top singles of the year were dominated by similar acts, with Lou Bega's Mambo #5 the number one of the year and TLC and Britney Spears claiming two top-20 singles in 1999.

New Zealand music produced some strong and popular releases. TrueBliss' Dream, although the third biggest-selling local album, was some way behind the number one and number two local offerings, the feelers' Supersystem (released last year, but like Twain, still selling by the truckload) and the most successful local debut album this year, Mix from Stellar*.

Honourable mentions (and brisk business) went to Shihad, Salmonella Dub and Dave Dobbyn.

The gong for the-unexpected-attempt-at-a-comeback went to Margaret Urlich for her Kiwi covers album Second Nature, which went gold (internationally, the most unsuccessful comeback was Blondie), while the Statement of Intent manifesto belongs to the Urban Pacifika record label for its compilation of South Auckland acts, Pioneers Of A Pacifikan Frontier.

Nearly gone, but not yet forgotten are the country's oldest teenagers, The Exponents. Time to get real jobs, boys.

Of the dozens of overseas rock acts that rolled through the country this year, the biggest was easy to spot: the Bee Gees attracted 60,000 fans to their Auckland concert in March.

PERFORMANCE Classical music had something of an annus horribilis.

Its foremost practitioners, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, drew smaller audiences in Auckland and announced a $1.48 million loss in the year to June, the apparent result of hot competition for arts sponsorship.

On the other hand, Opera New Zealand and the National Opera Company in Wellington merged to form New Zealand Opera and attracted the biggest dob of sponsorship dosh (a million) in the country's performance arts history.

The only real financial winners were the likes of Pavarotti. But with tickets going for between $90 and $450 and audiences in the tens of thousands, it is not difficult to see why. No big flash overseas productions dominated Auckland theatre during 1999.

However, Roger Hall delivered another crowd-pleaser with The Book Club, and the Auckland Theatre Company provided some of the year's highlights with Foreskin's Lament, Death Of A Salesman and Cabaret.

Maori and Pacific theatre had a strong, innovative year with impressive works from Pacific Underground (Romeo And Tusi), Victor Rodger (Sons), Taki Rua Productions (Purapurawhetu) and Toa Fraser (No2), the winner of the 1999 Bruce Mason Playwright of the Year.

Kate and Miranda Harcourt's Flowers From My Mother's Garden was quietly delightful and strongly multi-media (as was the ATC's Closer, though less successfully).

And for sheer quantity, Silo Theatre outperformed the rest and continued to be a worthy, growing and healthy proving ground for young playwrights and actors.

* Additional reporting Russell Baillie, Frances Grant, Graham Reid, Tara Werner