Paul Casserly: Straight to the pool room

TV began in NZ back in 1960 and went colour in 1974. Pic Getty.

TV began in NZ back in 1960, went colour in 1974 and went everywhere like a madwoman's knitting in the 2000s, with channels up the wazoo. As we head towards 2020 it can all seem a bit confusing, even for those of you with a full working cerebral cortex, undulled by bad genes or good weed.

Colour was the big moment in my lifetime and I can easily visualise the deep blue of the Commonwealth Games swimming pool that beamed up from Christchurch to Onehunga via a shop called Beggs Wisemans.

There I sat, plumply, staring at this mystical 20-inch wonder. Fast forward to our family getting a Phillips K9 Colour TV some 5 years later, (CHiPS was on) the arrival of the VHS player a few years after that, then the DVD and the last great peak, the MySky box.

I loved that thing for good five or six years, now I curse it, its laggy unintuitive system, its rain fade, boo hoo, call the wambulance. The pace of change continues to lurch inexorably online even as I cling to a decade-old non-smart plasma screen.

Will the leap into a 55-inch 4k screen with all the apps and shitty sound feel enough for me, I wonder, as I feel the old familiar pull to buy some expensive electronics I don't really need.

I've entered the end stage of my major purchase cycle, having a hawk eye on the prices as if it was the NZX top 50. I'm doomed to throw more money into that pit lined with about 10 TVs and a dozen things I've plugged in to them over the years.

And still, at the back of my mind, the fact that nothing has ever engaged me like Dr Who in black and white in 1975, or the 36 times I watched Pulp Fiction on VHS on a 14-inch back in the 90s.

Sure, Netflix, is great and mostly works fine, as does the local variant Lightbox. I pay for neither thanks to various deals with my phone and broadband, though I suspect Netflix would get my direct cash just by virtue of the scale of it's offering, if I really had to.

But Lightbox is pretty damn good too, and probably worth the $12.99 for the handful of superb shows that live within its digital curtains. It's home to the most talked about thing I've never seen, The Handmaid's Tale, and that much-loved, underrated gem, Better Call Saul, the spinoff that somehow seems better than its originator, Breaking Bad. I realise the Handmaid's Tale is an omission but I had a 'life's too short' moment about half-way through episode one and have been unable to get past it. Like many things, it's on my list, that ever-growing dossier of shows, books, travel destinations and sexual positions that I will never get close to knocking off.

It haunts me that list. It says you will die and you will miss out on stuff and hints at the cruel pointlessness of everything in the universe.

Get It To Te Papa is not on that list as I have already sucked the marrow of this delightful morsel. It's is the latest show on Lightbox and it's a local commission, a first for the platform. Made by a couple of particularly bright sparks from The Spinoff website (and the spinoff Spinoff TV show),

Get It To Te Papa posits that our national museum has failed to represent the true taonga of Aotearoa, namely a rag-tag collection of kitsch icons and questionable memorabilia from the 80s and 90s, no doubt the formative years of the disturbingly dry host Hayden Donnell and his dishevelled director and on-screen sidekick, Jose Barbosa. The installments, clocking in at around 20 minutes fair fly by, with their mix of goofy obsession and absurd diversions. As ever, the unexpected pleasures are things that are revealed about our history along the way and that ever-present question about who decides what really represents our culture anyway.

Their "mission" is to round up these items and somehow get them to the museum, who, I infer, were having absolutely nothing to do with this show and probably held several meetings about how to distance themselves from it. It's not exactly a documentary or a comedy, though it hits both marks with ease. Fans of the work of David Farrier and Nathan Fielder should feel at home here.

So just what is Te Papa missing out on?

Naturally the list includes the dildo that was flung at Steven Joyce at Waitangi, complete with the obligatory re-enactment at the scene of the crime and an interview with the thrower.

The creepy animatronics from the Big Fresh supermarkets of the 90s get an outing, Suzanne Paul ends up in a display case, and there's a rather surprising story surrounding the Deka sign in Huntly.

A televisual inorganic collection then? Yep, and that's the beauty of it.