Brian Rudman: Hill's dead art brings life back to TV's political jumble sale

With all but the minor places decided before the election campaign started, it was always going to be hard for the television channels to make this a watchable campaign.

Their solution? A strange hybrid of game show and talent quest, complete with celebrity hosts, quiz masters and supercharged panels of judges leaping about at the end telling us what to think.

TV One even trots out a police constable on the Holmes show to draw lots, not just for the speaking order in the next night's leaders' debate, but also for who stands next to whom.

This week, TV One tried to pep things up with a bit of reality TV, bringing back the dreaded worm, last let out of the compost heap in 1996.

One - to use the prime ministerial turn of phrase - had high hopes for the worm. I'd hoped it would at least inject a few squeals of anger or delight into the valium-saturated contest.

Fat chance.

All the worm came up with was Mr Mogadon himself, fence-sitting centrist Peter Dunne.

And to think that, to ward off the zealots of the Society for the Protection of Sensitive MPs, the worm was given a R18 rating and banned from our screens until 10pm.

Those driving the worm were chosen from that strange segment of society called the "undecideds", so Mr Dunne was, in retrospect, the obvious winner.

He's for nice things like apple pie and families and education and health, and against nasty things like crime and growing old - things that even undecideds can agree on.

Before Kim Hill burst onto the screen all a-twitching on Tuesday night, I was ready to abandon my television election-watch assignment.

Until the Hill dialogues, the debates on TV One, TV3 and Sky had all suffered the same problem - clutter.

Too many leaders, too many quiz masters, too many one-off contributed questions, too many commentators - and too little debate.

It's not the first question and answer you want to hear in an interview, it's the follow-up and the follow-up to that.

With a panel of journalists, each with their carefully prepared question, plus a chairman with a backpocket full of listeners' questions to air, such dialogue has been rare. Until the arrival of one-time radio star Kim Hill.

She has a voice like a chainsaw and a laugh to match. She also has what my father would have described as a bad case of ants in the pants.

On radio, that's not such a problem, but on the small screen, the flailing hands and the facial contortions take some getting used to.

Then there's that penetrating stare. But you do get used to it, quite quickly, as the questions start to flow.

The one-on-one interview used to be regular fare on our screens - Ian Fraser, Brian Edwards and Simon Walker spring to mind.

It's the perfect format for drawing a politician out and beyond the manifesto cliches.

On Tuesday, Hill started with Greens co-leader Rod Donald, Progressive Coalition leader Jim Anderton and Alliance leader Laila Harre.

Only 20 minutes apiece, but it was more than enough time to have all of them opening up like shellfish on a hotplate.

She'd hardly started with Mr Donald, for instance, when he volunteered that Green candidate Craig Potton was surfing in Samoa, rather than at home campaigning.

Claiming to be open-minded about genetic modification experiments, he was soon revealing how hardline he really is by admitting he would change his mind about how safe they were about the same time he decided nuclear power was safe.

Hill doesn't cuddle up to her interviewees like some of her more established male rivals. She keeps a professional distance, probing and prodding and above all, listening and thinking on her seat.

Sure, it's old-fashioned television interviewing, but it's been a dead art in this part of the world for so long that its return is welcome.

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