John Roughan: Spare us the return of tedious television

Settling into in a country motel with only a TV for company, you are liable to watch whatever you can get. Last Sunday I was fascinated by a woman eating huhu grubs.

A dozen attractive people, divided into male and female teams, were being put through picnic games in tropical isolation somewhere. They were all celebrities I suppose, though I recognised only two, cricketer Simon Doull and jockey Lance O'Sullivan.

Doull was pitching coconuts, or something similar, at a skull on a stake and the woman was competing with him to hit it. The rest watched as though their lives depended on the result.

I was about to turn it off and watch the water boil for coffee instead, when an off-screen voice announced the woman had lost and would have to eat two huhu grubs.

The creatures appeared close-up waiting in a wine glass. One of them squirmed its head towards the camera. I was mesmerised.

The woman quailed and her team issued cries of encouragement. The voice said that if she failed this test the guys would get the right to raid the girls' camp.

Nobody was laughing about any of this. Doull's crew looked seriously hungry for the prize. The woman's team gave her greater shrieks of encouragement.

With her face filling the screen you could see the effort she was making to shut down her mind, freeze her senses and just get through it.

She put the first in her mouth, chomped a few times and swallowed hard. Then she did it again with the second. As soon as it was down she gulped as much water as she could and turned for the hugs of her teammates.

Still nobody cracked a smile.The guys stared hard at the ground with all the bitter frustration of a rugby team that has just lost the club final.

This must be what they call reality television, prime exhibit in this week's indictment of TVNZ by a collection of eminent elder citizens who want the Government to restore the less commercial, more public-spirited television service they remember.

"Governments and advertisers have hijacked and abused our public television for too long," they wrote to Broadcasting Minister Steve Maharey. "We hope that you will have the determination to return it to serving its real owners, the people of New Zealand."

It is easy to dismiss their case as elitist and self serving. They want the public to pay for the kind of television they want to watch, a channel for programmes that would not attract enough advertising to pay for themselves because they are not as popular with the audience that advertisers apparently believe TV persuades.

Writing on this page yesterday, the producer of the Saturday Agenda programme on TV One, Richard Harman, said even that channel's target audience, determined by media buyers, is under 54. Well I am 54 as it happens, and I think I know what the worthies are missing.

It is not really the nature of the programmes, it is the nature of the medium now. The programmes they fondly cited - Close to Home, McPhail and Gadsby, Gallery - would look pretty dire on television today.

David McPhail, pointing out to TV3 on Wednesday that the programmes were made for a different era, was probably in mortal terror they would show a clip from his show.

The best indigenous comedy of that era, Fred Dagg, Billy T. James, has inspired the authentic, understated, apparently effortless Kiwi humour of Oscar Kightley, Marc Ellis and their ilk on programmes like Sports Cafe, Game of two Halves or Eating Media Lunch.

Those programmes, like reality television, contain an element of spontaneity that the home-grown comedy and drama of yesteryear lacked entirely. When it comes to "seeing ourselves", "reflecting New Zealand" and those other pieties of public broadcasting, reality television has something going for it.

It is commercial television. In theory a public service channel could produce the same programmes but it simply wouldn't. It wouldn't have the spark. It would be National Radio with pictures.

It would serve up plenty of interview programmes but they would not be nearly as popular as those the worthies remember. Those were blood sport and depended on the peculiar personal menace of Sir Robert Muldoon.

A succession of terrified journalists who made their names by enduring the late Prime Minister's withering facility to cut through the intellectual conceits of liberals who knew less than he did.

The programmes attracted a mass audience not for their informational value, which was pretty limited, if truth be known, but for the excruciating fascination of watching someone bait the bull, usually by repeating the same pointed question several times, and suffer the inevitable result.

It was not so very different from eating grubs, and about as meaningful much of the time.

New Zealanders of my age and older remember the arrival of TV and the powerful social force it quickly became.

We remember when there was just one channel and everybody watched the same programmes. They were British or American sitcoms, westerns, talk shows and crime dramas that became part of our common experience.

Nostalgia still gives them a glow they probably did not deserve; re-runs are not easy to watch for very long.

What we miss, I think, is not the programmes but the common experience of a single national channel. Now that television is as diverse and competitive as radio or magazines, no single channel, whatever its ownership or source of finance, can provide the social glue that it once did.

That may be the reason older baby boomers are not watching any of the broadcast channels much any more, and advertisers know it.

We have subscription channels, computers, DVDs and more books than we have time left to read. We've no right to tax everybody for television that most people would find tedious now.