In The Life and Times of a Brown Paper Bag, the 2010 book that presenter Kevin Milne wrote to mark the end of his long career on Fair Go, he remembers inquiring of then-TVNZ boss Rick Ellis how long he thought the soon-to-be-axed consumer show might last.
“For as long as it rates was his answer. Fair enough. In a perfect world, I suppose I’d love to have heard: ‘For as long as it proves a lifeline to Kiwis in need. It’s inextricably part of TVNZ’s brand now, like Country Calendar. We owe it so much.’”
Fair Go began on April 7, 1977. Its present team were hoping they would celebrate a 50th birthday in a few years. But with TVNZ’s gutting of its current affairs offerings, that’s it for Fair Go, the second-longest running show (after Country Calendar) on NZ television.
The show has had 50 or more presenters and reporters in its time. Some, like Milne and his first-generation FG colleagues Brian Edwards, Philip Alpers and Kerre Woodham, became household names from their time on the show. For some, like Kim Hill, Sharon Crosbie, Carol Hirschfeld and Amanda Millar, it was a springboard.
Since the show’s beginnings, many of its stars appeared in the pages of the Listener. Put all those features, profiles and reviews together and you would have a potted history of the show. Well, there’s an idea …
April 1977
Hardheaded interviewer Brian Edwards and producer Peter Morritt kick off a consumer show for Television One based on viewers’ complaints. Reporters Spencer Jolly and Gillian McGregor make up the initial line-up and the show also features a sideline in buyer-beware comedy skits.
Morritt: We’re interested in the little people either as citizens, employees, patients or consumers.
Edwards: One good thing about it is that if only one person in a dispute is willing to appear, then we will still go ahead. In the old NZBC days, if both sides weren’t able to be presented then the story wasn’t run.
Spencer Jolly: We’re not off on a crusade but rather we’ll act as prompt for people on both sides of a dispute. Some may not be very articulate, and that may be the crux of the problem.
Among the stories Jolly covers in the first episodes is a letter from a boy who has had no luck in lolly scrambles. He is sent home happy.
Listener writer Karen Jackman: The subject matter – Little Man v the System – has always been a comedy classic. Fair Go will be treading a thin line between the funniest show on television or the most pompous.
April 1978
The show is a ratings hit and wins the Feltex Television Award for the best information programme. It’s also having an effect on the country.
Listener writer Katherine Findlay: It is a trifle curious that a programme relying on other people’s dishonesty for the bulk of its material should rate as one of TV1′s biggest successes.
Edwards: What is good is what’s happing in the shops. Take the person who buys a toy that falls to bits in five minutes. That person returns to the shop and says, “You’ve got to give me my money back – I know because I saw it on Fair Go.” Or if you don’t give me my money back, I’m going to write to Fair Go.”
Findlay: The broadcasting complaints committee has had occasion to censure the team. In defence Edwards explains that you can’t treat live television like a newspaper.
Edwards: You can’t weigh up every single word. …we’ve got to be able to articulate people’s prejudices.
Findlay: Edwards tends to move away quickly after a show is over, as there has been the odd punch-up between the wronged and he wrong-doer in the [tv studio] Avalon club.
Edwards: There was one man who I thought had done rather badly. When he left, his wife was in tears, and he was saying things like “that’s the end of my business.” In that situation you feel terribly torn. On one hand, there is the right to expose; on the other there is the human aspect, the thought that you could actually be destroying someone.
After a year, frequent complaints are bad workmanship on houses, lawyers, shoddy products, mail-order rip-offs, price increases, insurance companies and misleading advertisements, including one by a well-known national magazine.
Edwards: We got the Listener – that model of journalistic propriety. But it had changed its advertisement by the next week.
January 1986
The team now includes Alpers and Milne. Edwards has left the show to be replaced by fellow hard-hitting interviewer Simon Walker. The Listener runs an interview by Alpers with Edwards for his series Let Me Speak, in which Edwards ponders how Fair Go has never been successfully sued.
Edwards: If we made mistakes on Fair Go to the extent that mistakes are made in news and current affairs, we’d have been down the tube for millions of dollars over the years.
People used to fight. Now they won’t. If they’re in the wrong, they’ll give in immediately and it’s becoming more and more difficult to get good stories on air without having them resolved off air. From the consumer’s viewpoint, that’s a very good thing. But from the entertainment viewpoint it’s a bad thing because Fair Go is losing some very good stories.
The Listener’s billing for Let Me Speak: A series of debates in which Brian Edwards unashamedly airs his prejudices about people, institutions, and ideas.
Edwards: My ambition is to be remembered for something, and I don’t think you get remembered for television – you can’t gain respectable fame on television. Here in TV, we all tend to sneakily see ourselves as prostitutes and what we’re really seeking is respectability. It’s a bit like a woman who says, “I wish men would love me for my mind.
Later in the year, Edwards is involved in trying to sue Fair Go. When the makers of organic fertiliser Maxicrop sue the show and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries for their April 1985 investigation into the product, they hire Edwards as an adviser for the court case that will languish for a year, during which the case against Fair Go is thrown out.
May 1986
Listener writer Graham Ford talks to new producer Keith Slater. The show is now getting 3000 letters a year, though some of the correspondence isn’t quite up to snuff.
Slater: A lot of these letters are just nit-picking. People are extremely house proud. A little bit of Gib board not fitting exactly and it takes on horrendous proportions in a person’s mind. They write to the prime minister about it.
Ford: This year, Slater is planning a mix of three hard stories to two softer ones, such as why bubble gum doesn’t bubble and how the hole is put in Shrewsbury biscuits.
Slater: Some of the bitterness makes the Springbok tour look like a tea party. I just wish there was more awareness on both sides of the importance of good public relations and a little more courtesy and consideration. I would say New Zealanders are a very rude race and the bitterness that will surface over some minuscule dispute is just horrifying. This normally dour, phlegmatic race of home handymen – all of a sudden, pow! They just want to go.
May 1988
Reviewer David Hill ponders the presenting style on Fair Go, not for the last time.
Hill: I wish that Philip Alpers and Kerre Woodham wouldn’t bob and twinkle at their own witticisms. I wait each week with knee clenching anticipation to see what clashes in the shirt and tie spectrum Alpers will offer. Also to see if Carol Hirschfeld is dewily delicious as she was last week and if Kevin Milne can maintain the art of moving his mouth while keeping the rest of his features totally immobile.
August 1988
Graham Ford goes behind the scenes again with new producer Chris Harrington. New reporter Anna Kenna has extracted a $118,000 settlement for Waikato farming couple Graham and Trish Little after their lawyer stole it and the Law Society and National Australia Bank refused liability. Fair Go now has 800,000 to 900,000 weekly viewers. Its team pose as gunslingers for a Listener photo shoot.
Ford: This has been a vintage year for Fair Go … yet its success hides the growing complexity and difficulty of its production. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that belies the confident, cheery faces of its presenters on Tuesday nights.
Alpers: It started off as a very risky, will-this-survive-a-year, almost entertainment programme. It has only recently gone in for real investigative journalism.
Harrington: I would dearly love to have an additional three researchers, two directors and a journalist and we could pursue more Little-style stories, but we are in the real world, and we can only do one Little versus the Law Society a year.
Alpers: Nobody has taken into account that the type of investigations we are now doing are much more demanding on staff, on time, on homelife.
Ford: Three weeks before the present series started, there was a complaint on Alpers’ desk against a former cabinet minister, an allegation of a multimillion-dollar rip-off involving a large finance company, and a group of women claiming a health professional had abused them and their children over the past 12 years and nothing had been done.
Alpers: We just would have never got such heavy stories as that five years ago.
February 1990
Listener writer Noel O’Hare profiles Milne in a piece that inspires a title for his eventual memoir.
O’Hare: In the era of glossily packaged TV performers, Milne stands out like a brown-paper parcel.
Milne: I think it’s fair to say that if I were a woman I would be struggling to hold the job I’ve got. It’s a damn sight harder for a woman with ordinary looks to get the job I’ve got.
O’Hare: A three-hour interview has merely scratched the surface of Kevin Milne’s ordinariness.
Milne: I think when you’re working on the programme you could be lured into thinking you’re a powerful or extremely skilled journalist who makes things happen, when the truth of the matter is you’re the pilot of an extremely powerful jet.
April 1990
David Hill reviews again
Hill: Those little eyebrow elevations, lip quirks and head cocks which still occasionally make me wish to see Milne and Philip Alpers fitted with neck braces, sometimes seemed to imply “we’ve got a right wronged one here, haven’t we?” Its studio setup of emphatically visible cameras and cables plus live audience gives the agreeable illusion of this being TV as it happens. Pity that the live audience clap as if they’re not.
May 1990
Kerre Woodham is profiled by Douglas Jenkin and photographed in a Marilyn Monroe-esque pout.
Jenkin: The stories that Woodham does on the show often display her flair for comedy as well as her strong screen presence. Usually, they’re lighter pieces, what she calls “tits and bums” stuff.
Woodham: I’d like to think that I could mount serious investigations, well researched and documented, but I don’t really know where to begin.
Harrington: When she was about 7, she saw a Marilyn Monroe movie and was impressed. But when you get past that, there’s a very good journalist there. She also knows how to write and deliver a very funny script.
Woodham: I look back at my earlier stuff on tape and think, eech. There’s too much wriggling and pouting. I was trying too hard.
August 1991
New reporter Sean Plunket is profiled by Simon Vita. He joins a team that now includes Liane Clarke and Rosalie Nelson. After having a ladder thrown at him by a dodgy painter, he eventually leaves for Holmes and later Morning Report.
Vita: Plunket says his appointment goes against what he perceived was the old attitude – hire young women to “doll up” the show.
Plunket: Perhaps, if you like, young males were discriminated against because they didn’t bring to the show the sort of glamour female journalists did.
Vita: The spectre of Paul Holmes has recently cast a shadow over Fair Go. Some of the stories on Holmes fall within Fair Go territory and there is competition between the shows.
April 1997
Milne talks to the Listener about the show’s 20th anniversary. A former colleague comes up in the conversation.
Milne: I have to say that I wonder about the credibility of people who invent shows, work on them for seven years, and then, the moment they leave, make money out of actually advising people how to deal with the show itself. I’m not saying, of course, that’s what Brian did …
We’re the public’s Mongrel Mob. I’ve always fought to try and minimise this publicity bullshit that we’re white knights. I remember once, the Listener wanted us to do a cover story of us dressed like that. We ended up as gunslingers … We’ve posed as Robin Hood and his Merry Men. The fact is, we’re all bloody well paid. I often feel like an … undertaker who’s made a pretty damn good living out of other people’s misfortunes.
A letter to the Listener arrives from Edwards soon after.
Edwards: The programme is most competent in dealing with small uncomplicated issues and least competent in dealing with large, complex issues. Fair Go’s modus operandi is designed to advantage the complainant and disadvantage the “complainee”. The programme is frequently unfair in its dealing with and treatment of complainees and, on occasions, less than honest.
March 1998
The Wellington-based show has moved to Auckland and is now under TVNZ’s news and current affairs department. Bruce Ansley reviews the latest iteration.
Ansley: Fair Go is that most elusive of programmes, a perfect fit with the New Zealand psyche. The Kiwi battlers have mutated over the years. They might have united against authority once; now they are more likely to rat … for a rising nation of whingers, Fair Go is the ideal vehicle. It is the most-used threat in the country. The cost can be heavy but there is no shortage of good folk ready to wring their hands on Fair Go.
July 1998
Diana Wichtel reviews the 21st anniversary special: Watching the clips from over the years, you realised how ahead of its time Fair Go was. Under the benign guise of community service, the show got away with things that would be sneeringly labelled “tabloid” when local news and current affairs shows got onto them. Foot-in-the-door reporting, sneaking around in the bushes, hiding in unmarked vans – the Fair Go team were prototype paparazzi.
We got to see an angry little man attack Sean Plunket with a ladder. Excellent.
March 2007
Wichtel profiles Milne for the show’s 30th anniversary. He is photographed wearing angel’s wings. She also asks Edwards for his views.
Wichtel: The show that made consumer bleating into a high-rating prime-time ritual that this year is celebrating its 30th anniversary owes a lot to Milne’s genial, cool-under-fire presence.
Milne: I’m the show’s Ken Barlow. I may be sadly misleading myself but I just love the fact I’ve been in television for 30 years and I don’t think it’s changed me a bit.
Wichtel: Watching Milne preside over the proceedings, the thought occurs that he’s not so much Ken Barlow as an older, more sensible Father Ted.
Edwards: It’s the best it’s ever been. I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes another 10 years. Maybe the show is a little unfair now. But I can tell you it was a bloody unfair back then.
April 2008
Gordon Harcourt, part of a generation of reporters who grew up with the show, rejoins Fair Go after a brief stint in 1995. He will go on to co-present with Pippa Wetzell, who is still in the role.
Harcourt: The sad thing about Fair Go is that it still actually needs to be there. I was appalled the first time around by the lack of conscience you come up against and it’s still happening. The issues move on – 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been chasing telco companies with dodgy broadband service, so the programme responds.
So how are his doorstopping skills?
Harcourt: I’m looking forward to that one. I went off for my first shoot and my wife sent me a text message saying, “Don’t get punched on the nose.”
In 2011, he’s punched in the head three times by a Mt Maunganui car dealer who later pleads guilty to assault and intentional damage to a Fair Go camera.
