Jim Hopkins: During prime time, there's no place like Holmes

Be he never so humble, there's no place for Holmes. And that's sad.

It's a shame he's been axed, slashed, chopped, hacked, dumped, ditched, bombed, blitzed, slammed, censored, sunk, savaged or any of the other colourful terms that Holmes himself might use; provided he was talking about somebody else.

Say what you will about the feisty little fellow (and most people do) prime time will be blander without him.

The Lazi-Boys (and Girls) of Outer Roa may find their lounges are duller, safer and more boring places now that Dennis' menace has faded to black.

It's particularly ironic (and possibly poignant) that the gnomic one should crash in the same week that Discovery finally lands safely, if only because his programme was a much better gap filler than the ones on the shuttle. Unlike them, it didn't need to be removed. Not on safety grounds, anyway.

Indeed, there's a case for saying we're less safe now that programme has been consigned to oblivion.

Somebody once described American television as "a vast wasteland". And it may still be. But not here. Here, it's "a vast kindergarten", full of people who patronisingly dispense a suffocatingly narrow range of approved views, the better to ensure their audience is properly "educated".

Not so with Holmes. Not recently, anyway. Putting aside the creeping (and creepy?) text messages, his show was generally the equal of its rivals in terms of content and, more important, it never felt like the Gospel of Grey Lynn.

It never radiated the unctuous post-modern piety that has become an inescapable trademark of the parsonical Mr Campbell and the beatific Susan.

To the extent that their programmes increasingly resemble Listen with Mother - and Father, it's difficult to resist the conclusion that both are determined to turn the whole country into one great, big, middle-class dinner party where all the guests spout identikit views on race, religion, treaty and tax.

But Holmes was different. Out in the suburbs, over on Prime, Holmes was playing Peter, adding an inch of Finch to his on-screen persona. You'll likely remember the famous line the actor roared in the movie Network: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!!!"

And so it was with Holmes. He seemed to be a bit mad, too (in the angry sense), and not willing to take it any more, either.

This may have been a commercial decision or an intuitive sense that the audience's earth had moved, or perhaps a bit of both. Whatever the reason, he had become the voice less heard. On television, anyway.

And there is a demand for that voice; a demand the commentariat mightn't wish to acknowledge but which is there, nonetheless.

You need only travel about a bit more often than the cloistered telly types do to realise that.

All over the country, in all the places you don't find $60 bottles of taxpayer wine, what you do find is all manner of people desperate to breathe a little incorrect air.

For some, at least, Holmes gave them that, and demolishing Holmes won't make them go away. It'll simply mean they'll get their oxygen from each other, that's all.

At least while Holmes is left languishing in the Rest Holmes. Which could well be some time. Longer than the brief period his new show was on air, put it that way.

Prime's failure to persist with the programme suggests that the network has much less patience than money. What price they will pay in the longer term is a matter of conjecture, but it is clear their decision has already cost Holmes something intangible yet invaluable, namely his reputation.

Not completely, of course. He still newstalks the radio jungle to ferocious effect but there is no doubt he has been wounded by this debacle.

There will be those who say (and have already said): "Serves him right. We never liked him anyway."

Such declarations may comfort the aloof and the malicious, but they still miss the point.

Holmes wasn't the problem. And neither was his show.

If anything, it was a blessed relief, an overdue alternative to the ideological orthodoxy of his rivals.

The problem wasn't the show but rather the fact that it was expected (and perhaps obliged) to fly before it had even taken off. Which is extremely hard to do when it is required to follow a news programme that was both underfunded and unwatched.

That was the problem Holmes's employers either failed to identify or failed to address. And he's the one who has had to pay their price.

In its latest incarnation, Holmes was beginning to offer an embryonic alternative to the patronising smugness and subtle indoctrination of longer-established and better-resourced shows.

Those who resent the condescension - particularly on Television New Zealand, whose failure to treat successive governments even-handedly makes them less a public broadcaster and more an antipodean version of Tass, the official Soviet news agency - will greatly regret the summary sacking of a flawed but brave broadcaster.

Whether we watched it or not, we are all poorer for the loss of his show. Let's hope he's back on air soon - perhaps to irritate but certainly to oxygenate.