Colin Hogg: Delving back into the pain of politics

Rhys Darby in After Hours ... just what the political shows need.

Opinion

The bilious banquet is a duty call, but the comedians are more fun.

I gave up on political television a while back, having made myself sick from swallowing so much of the stuff before, during and straight after the general election.

But I couldn't keep that up forever and call myself a critic. Yes, it was time to go back to the bilious banquet - and so back I bravely went, twice over the weekend, on Saturday morning for TV3's The Nation and again, at church time on Sunday, for TV One's Q+A.

I'm still trembling from the experience and, no, not with excitement so much as with the weight of all the words that pour out of the shows, many of those words repeated, some in unusual arrangements.

On Q+A, in an interview with Rachel Smalley, Justice Minister Amy Adams, perhaps unsettled by Smalley's cool gaze, kept barking about everything being a "priority".

It seemed even her priorities were priorities and I wasn't sure at all what the minister meant when she referred to her "constrained baselines".

Earlier in the show, Deputy Prime Minister Bill English was drawn - but not hanged nor quartered - by Q+A presenter Susan Wood on the still-popular issue of dirty politics.

Prime Minister John Key runs a very "transparent" government, said English so many times it was as if he believed it, though English has a wily way of saying a lot without ever saying much at all.

I'd already seen him interviewed on all the same stuff, the previous day on The Nation, where that show's presenter, Lisa Owen, had attempted a more forthright assault, firing a series of sometimes wild questions.

At one point she even demanded to know, "Do you owe (Dirty Politics author) Nicky Hager an apology?"

Still Bill barely moved an eyebrow. "You're dancing on the head of a pin," he said with that John Wayne timing of his.

A strange pin too, given that Hager was on the same show, as a member of The Nation's opinionated panel last Saturday. Any apologies could have been proffered in the green room.

On the subject of those three-headed things called panels, they took up almost as much space as the interviews on The Nation and Q+A, causing me to groan and twitch in pain from all the opinions being hurled at me.

On The Nation the panellists were a little lighter and all blokes - Hager, columnist Toby Manhire and a PR consultant called Scott Campbell.

And on Q+A, all women - Michelle Boag, spinning wildly from the right, Josie Pagani, spinning sweetly from the left and political scientist Bronwyn Haywood filling all available gaps in between with gales of words. Gales of them.

I went out for a walk and came back and she was still talking. It was mesmerising but not in an entirely good way.

A show that's full of words in a much better way altogether is a new one called After Hours (TV3, Friday, 10.10pm), a snappy stand-up comedy series featuring local performers taking turns surrounded by a lively studio audience.

Basset-eyed Ben Hurley is just the right man as the downbeat host, with three guests to get through in half an hour, topped by Rhys Darby, closing the show with a 10-minute blast of weird genius.

He's just the sort of thing those panels could use.