Roll up for best show in town

John Key Photo/File

Oh, how I love the lead-up to a good general election. It's the only time when prime time TV between Home and Away at 5.30pm and Shortland Street at 7pm can compete for sheer entertainment value.

Forget hard-hitting news at 6pm. Between now and September 20, tune in instead to your favourite type-cast characters: overweight likeable rogue and wanted man Kim Dotcom, cool-cat PM John Key with his brilliantly scripted made-for-telly one-liners, and just plain old cat-like David Cunliffe (check out catsthatlooklikedavidcunliffe.tumblr.com if you don't believe me).

And as if looking like a cat isn't enough to bid for the top spot running a country these days, it seems you even have to act like one to secure your spot in the polls.

No, folks, we're not interested in policy. It's personality that rates, and more specifically the ability to find faults in the opponent's personality and launch catty attacks that fall far short of what most voters expect from people charged with running a nation.

Failing that, any old tenuous link to a wealthy immigrant with residency will do nicely. Although I do find it odd that this particular plot-line seems to be shamelessly rehashed by most parties this year a little bit of originality among the political PR teams would go a long way.

While there have undoubtedly been some genuinely compelling pitches for prime time based around ever-popular election-year plot-lines such as poverty and crime stats, these have been very much overshadowed by the more entertaining political stories based around digging for dirt and then throwing it in a way that would leave toddlers in the sandpit wide-eyed with awe.

What amazes me most is that there can be so much dirt to throw among a group of typically well heeled, well educated middle class "leaders" knowingly putting their hand up for a role that will inevitably put them under intense personal scrutiny.

While the rest of us get on with our unremarkable lives utterly devoid of potential scandal, politicians seem to be in disproportionate possession of skeletons tucked away in closets. Or is it just that, as a breed, they sign too many conveniently forgettable documents and accept too many cheques?

Never has the phrase "to the best of my knowledge" been more widely used than in this particular election year.

Although I'd love to think my taxpayer dollars were being exclusively used to address those tricky poverty and crime issues, I can't help but wonder how many bureaucrats are instead being paid to sift through dusty documents in the hope of finding some tasty little nugget of scandal to leak to the press.

Where else can you find a country where a man wanted by the FBI for the glamorous alleged crime of stealing intellectual property from Hollywood studios and international rock stars wants to get his own party into Parliament?

What nation can claim local MP candidates standing for Labour this election when last time they were manning the phones for National? Or have news stories about politicians cutting off their ponytails generating the sort of public engagement Shortland Street could only dream of?

Anyone who claims politics are boring has clearly never picked up a newspaper in New Zealand.

Just quite who will make up the cast of the next Parliament is anyone's guess but what I do know is that, regardless of their skills running a country, they will at least keep us tuning in for the next cunning twist in the prime-time political plot(ting).