KEY POINTS:
About the most popular television show round our place at the moment is a thing on TV3 called Wipeout.
In each episode, an eclectic bunch of fortune-grasping Americans compete for money (and their 15 minutes of fame) by shedding all semblance of anything approaching dignity as they
fall off stuff, get pummelled by stuff and have multiple indignities performed on their sodden, mud-caked, mangled bodies by other stuff.
Wipeout is human-versus-machine at its finest and it encapsulates all that is noble and good about TV.
Wipeout is, I would argue, one of first culturally defining moments of the 21st century, in that it defines how low humanity can truly sink in any given century.
Therefore, it follows, hopefully, that having reached our nadir this early on, things can only improve and the new tele-visual renaissance is surely just around the corner. This is not to say that Wipeout is bad. Hell no, it's great. But it's great in the way that when it's the other fella getting the blow to the gonads, it's comedy; but when it's you, it's tragedy.
Watching Wipeout is like watching multiple train-wrecks, in slow-motion - with the reassurance of knowing that as everything (up to and including the contestants) is padded up the wazoo, so no one really gets hurt as the Wipeout machines smash the bejesus out of every human in sight.
Or do they? After all, we only see the bits the producers want us to see; it may very well resemble a Baghdad hospital emergency room out the back of the Wipeout set for all we know. And I bet before you get to be a contestant/human pinball on this show, you have to sign a bunch of waivers indemnifying the producers from everything from death to paralysis to accidental dismemberment to future infertility due to massive groinal trauma.
So why do I and the whanau love Wipeout? Why, every week, do I swear I will never watch this mindless display of cruelty again but, seven days later, find myself sitting in front of the telly, wincing (and laughing, I confess) as tragic and greedy Americans bounce helplessly from one giant ball to the next before being deposited unceremoniously in the drink?
Okay, obviously part of this is the sight of something that is good for the soul. But I think it goes much deeper than that, surprisingly deep for a show as shallow as Wipeout. It is, to me, slapstick at its finest - as well as being a programme where people actually do get slapped, with a giant stick.
Slapstick is a fine and venerable form of comedy that dates back hundreds of years, to the commedia dell'arte, which involved Italians hitting each other with sticks while other Italians laughed. Now we have machines hitting people while millions of people laugh.
That is evolution at its finest. I think, in fact, that Wipeout is so brilliant it should be a template when it comes to spicing up a lot of the entertainment and social events of today.
Imagine how much more fun Fashion Week could become if the gloomy-looking models had to parade up and down a foam-covered moving catwalk while having to dodge giant padded sides of beef being shot at them from cannons dotted round the auditorium.
Now that would be entertainment at its finest and most fashionable. And don't even get me started on how much more fun the forthcoming lie-fest, commonly known as the election campaign, would be if it incorporated some of the crueller aspects of Wipeout.
Instead of boring leaders' debates they should have Celebrity Political Wipeout episodes. Any chance to see Rodney Hide get whacked in the 'nads has got to be worth it. And we'd surely know, once and for all, whether John Key is all just hot air once he's had it knocked out of him by some giant bouncy balls.
Yes, it would probably be undignified to see our nation's leaders in such a light; but, let's face it, dignity has no place in politics these days. And yes, it would be cruel but there is a saying, "you have to be cruel to be kind" and, in this case, we would be being kind to ourselves by being cruel to them, so it'd be a win-win situation all round (except possibly for Rodney if/when he takes the blow).
Yes, there is a place for cruelty in our lives: and that place is called politics.
