Radiation by Fiona Rae

The trouble with having a blog is that you start writing one in your head while you’re actually experiencing something and then you immediately forget as soon as something else happens. So I’m trying to remember the smell of the London Underground, the hot, stinky air that punches you as the train approaches, the crowds, the steel band that was playing outside Brixton tube, the excitement mixed with the instant familiarity of being back in London after 15 years.

I loved it, although I was there less than 24 hours. From this distance, a trip to Rome for three days with a tacked-on night in London means you spend something like 28 hours in the air and approximately 55 stuck in transit lounges, duty-free areas and pre-flight holding pens. Plus, your bag is x-rayed 150 times. I think it might be radioactive now.

Apart from the Flaming Lips at the Albert Hall (okay, that's the last reference to that) I also managed to squeeze in a trip to the V&A museum to see the Modernism exhibition, in which there is a multi-coloured suit that immediately made me think of Split Enz. There were also a lot of chairs. Modernism got a bad rap in the UK, where it was translated into a load of brutal tower blocks and housing estates, but you forget that a lot of the stuff designed after World War I, some of it still in production today, was new and exciting and supposed to herald the beginning of a utopia after the horrors of the war. Here’s a bloke who knows a bit more about design than me who also went.

But that was so last month and now I’ve recovered, I think it took about two weeks, and it’s back to more important things. Like, does anyone else think that NZ Idol has jumped the shark? Okay, dumb question, but Iain Stables? Megan Alatini? Who are these people? And isn’t the whole cash prizes thing just a bit desperate? Who’s managing the winner now that Paul Ellis is gone? If you don’t care who is in the final of American Idol, here’s a good story from the LA Times about that phenomenon.

Speaking of local, Orange Roughies is very sexy, apparently. I’ve PVRed it, which brings me to a big complaint about the otherwise excellent MySky PVR. On a number of occasions, I’ve recorded programmes and upon viewing, the recording stops before the end of the show. Fuck! The only way to avoid this is to record the programme directly afterwards as well, which will pick up where you were left hanging.

Good news: TVNZ is promising The Sopranos later in the year and Life on Mars very soon. Appointment viewing, friends.

Last, I have the Letterman list:
Monday, May 29, actress Halle Berry; Monster Garage star Jesse James
Tuesday, May 30, comedian Bill Maher; actress Rita Wilson
Wednesday, May 31, actor Jason Lee; animal expert Jack Hanna
Thursday, June 1, actress Julia Roberts; musical guests Pearl Jam
Friday, June 2, actor Vince Vaughn; musical guest K.T. Tunstall
Monday, June 5, actor Tom Cruise; chef Jamie Oliver

So it’s good to be back in the bosom of my whanau, as we say around these parts, although the ground still seems to be shifting underneath my feet. Jet lag is a bitch. But what am I complaining about? I was on the press junket to end them all really, along with 59 other journos from around the world. When Rome wants to be on the world stage, it gets on the world stage.

We were really there as promotion for a documentary on the History Channel called Rome: Engineering an Empire and I have Listener stories to write about all this, but apart from staying in a beautiful boutique hotel, being bussed around for several four-course meals, taken for a guided tour of the Coliseum and witnessing the most extraordinary media scrum at the opening of the new Ara Pacis monument, as Russell mentioned, I was serendipitously also in London on the very night the Flaming Lips played the Royal Albert Hall.

I didn’t see Hurley from Lost as the only tickets left were standing-room only in the Gallery – that’s the very top tier of the hall – but it was still one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen and now I know how many balloons it takes to fill the Albert Hall. So this is just a quick post to let y’all know that the FLips are the musical guests on Letterman tonight (Thursday). Set your PVRs.

It’s a pity the TVNZ reporter who recorded the biffo on Dixon Street between TVNZ and TV3 journos didn’t send the footage in to work so that it went in here and came out there. Jeez, isn’t it supposed to be our news now?

As every blog I write these days seems to contain an apology, here’s this month’s one: I’m sorry, oh god, I’m so sorry. I won’t bore you with the details, but I can say that being ill means watching all the catch-up TV you want and becoming hypnotised by the Commonwealth Games. Although, could the music TV1 is using for the links and behind the information be any worse? Okay if you’re a Mudvayne fan I suppose. Geoff Bryan, who is not a heavy metal kind of guy, is having to yell to be heard, although nothing’s yelling louder than that ug-lee studio they’ve built all special for the Games. Ah well, at least there’s Moss Burmester to “steal our hearts”, according to Geoff anyway.

So as the mild-mannered David Slack has pointed out, I interviewed John Clarke, which was an entirely pleasurable experience. Yes, we talked for ages, John and me, about many things, including the state of Australian television. Not good. The free trade agreement with the US is going to screw the industry, he says. According to US new media commentator Mark Pesce, Australia could become little more than an American cultural outpost. That’s what he said in a speech to the Screen Producers Association of Australia, anyway. Here’s a good rundown from the Australian Writers’ Guild too. And if there comes a time when there are a lot of Australians working in the New Zealand television industry, you’ll know why.

God knows I’ve been trying to like CSI and its various franchises, I really have, but whenever I start watching and an ad break comes along – and there are a lot of those – I get distracted by other things. You know, by other channels, the kettle that needs switching on in the kitchen, some particularly interesting paint that’s drying on a wall somewhere in the house.

I know it’s a selling point, but basically, CSI: BigAmericanCity is not emotionally satisfying. I don’t know if it’s a girl thing or a me thing, but I don’t watch drama to see guys with a lot of belt attachments swab semen off hotel windows. Or tweezer minute pieces of gravel out of skull fragments. Or, and this sounds like a Maori insult, boil someone’s head in a large cooking pot.

I need a bit more emotional connection than that, to be perfectly Francis with you, but back to back Cold Case and Close to Home, presumably supposed to be a kind of Chick Scene Investigation ploy to reel in female viewers, is too much fake emotion in one evening, even if Christian Kane from Buffy is in the latter.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got, pretty pathetic I know, but the boyfriend has threatened to sic the blog police onto me if I don’t post right now.

This year’s new TV shows are nearly upon us – Lost is coming, as is Commander in Chief, Grey’s Anatomy, Casanova and a slew of new US shows which mostly look pretty dodgy. Although it’s fair to say the New Zealand programmers get the pick of the bunch of US and UK fare, there’s an awful lot of stuff out there that completely passes them by. Why? They think New Zealand television audiences are a bunch of dumb asses, that’s why.

So here’s a little list of programmes we’ll never see on New Zealand television. Probably. Feel free to add some of your own.

1. A Century of the Self. PR spin and consumerism are all Freud's fault. Or rather his nephew, Edward Bernays, who took his uncle's ideas of the self and used them to manipulate the masses, linking their (our) unconscious desires to consumer goods.

2. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart, we love you. You and your copious writing staff shine the searchlight of satire and comedy on the US political system. Plus, you are funny and kind of hot. You have good guests too, usually authors, but sometimes it’s Dolly Parton or Ricky Gervais. Looking forward to the Oscars, dude.

3. The Colbert Report. Grippy! Although not as zingy as The Daily Show, which it follows on Comedy Central, more a riff on dumb right-wing thinking.

4. The Staircase aka Death on the Staircase. It screened on the Sundance Channel, but here’s a BBC4 interview with filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, who also made an Oscar-winning documentary about a black kid accused of killing a white woman. De Lestrade was granted unusual access to murder-mystery writer Michael Peterson, who was accused of killing his wealthy wife. He says that once the police discovered that Peterson was bisexual, they assumed he was guilty.

5. The Root of All Evil? Russell’s blogged about this, Richard Dawkins’ documentary about the tyranny of blind faith.

6. Ethiopian Idols. You’d think that Fremantle, the owner of the Idol format, could have let Ethiopia off for this one – but according to this story, Fremantle is going to charge the show’s producers a fee. However, we’d really like to hear the singing, and the costumes look quite nice too.

7. The Office. The US version that is, with Steve Carrell. The first episode is weird, because it’s almost the same as the British one, only with Americanisms. But it gets better. And just as excruciating. According to EW (which named Carrell as one of its entertainers of the year), the scripts “spew American corporate absurdist vernacular with perfect pitch”. Plus it does the near impossible, honors Ricky Gervais’ original and works on its own terms.

8. The Wire. Will we ever see the third season of the finest cop show ever made?

Thanks for all your best-of 2005 picks – and the winner is: Firefly! Heh. Geeks rule. Thanks to Graeme also for remembering The Wire, which is, without a doubt, the best cop show I have ever seen and also quite possibly the only show with a scene in which the only word – said many times – is “fuck”.

Venetia’s long and wonderful email includes Angel (of course!): “How many other shows could turn the main character into a Muppet for an episode?”; Carnivàle, Doctor Who, Kingdom Hospital, Battlestar Galactica, Strange (on UKTV) and Medium.

Medium annoyed the shit out of me, actually – if you’d seen the mediums episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit (another good one from the year), it was pretty clear what a lot of fakery all that crossing over crap is. If you liked Medium, however, get ready for Jennifer Love Hewitt in Ghost Whisperer, coming soon to TV2, and also Supernatural, which does star Jared Padalecki – Dean from Gilmore Girls.

Graeme also mentions Battlestar Galactica and sends this link to Time’s best-of list.

Friend of Public Address, Gordon Dryden’s list for 2005 is as follows:

1. That Garth George's religious column be removed from “perspectives” and be submitted instead, each week, for a Herald letter and see how many qualify.

2. That the New Zealand public education debate concentrate on our dozens of great schools that actually lead the world in learning, yet few outside them know they exist.

3. That at least one New Zealand political party discovers the real benefits of the “open source” movement: a genuine third-way alternative to bureaucratic socialism and greedy capitalism.

4. That New Zealand ceases to be the only advanced country in the world, outside the United States, to permit “ask your doctor if this high-priced copycat medicine is right for you”.

5. That TVNZ appoints a CEO who has some idea of what real public-service television can achieve, perhaps with the new DG of BBC as a mentor.

6. That all sports broadcasters, under pain of dismissal, be instructed to delete the meaningless phrase “on this (or that) occasion” from at least every third sentence.

7. That Colin James gets his first New Year wish, and New Zealand starts to “think big” again, but in the creation of big ideas.

8. That the next election will be fought on other than single-issue tax-bribe policies.

Dude, I was talking about your favourite television programme, but that’s a very lovely list anyway.

Meantime, Nic gives up the love to … BitTorrent. Top five: Firefly (shiny!), The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Doctor Who, Beginner’s Guide to Love and Lost – season two that is. Nic, you are a very naughty man and I can neither confirm nor deny that season two of Lost is bitchin’ and The Daily Show is so scarily funny it hurts. In addition, The Colbert Report proves that Americans do have a sense of irony, although you heard none of that here. (Also, season two of Veronica Mars is brilliant. Guest stars include Alyson Hannigan, Charisma Carpenter and a cameo from Joss Whedon and more plotlines than you would have thought it was physically possible to cram into one commercial hour. As EW said: “What sophomore slump?” Um, you also didn’t hear that here.)

Speaking of Joss, EW quotes him saying no more Serenity – he’s okay with that, he has closure – and Tim sends this link re what he’s doing now. A new series of Shameless has started in the UK, here’s a good story about a posh reporter who went down to West Gorton estate where the series is filmed. And speaking of telly on the internet, this is an interesting interview with the new director of the BBC, Mark Thompson, in which he talks about some of the stuff that Ashley Highfield was on about at the Great Blend, like rolling out the interactive media player.

Thanks for the bad back advice/commiserations/recommendations: it’s mostly better now, thanks to the osteo, apart from the nasty pains in my right leg. It’s a bugger how it takes only a short time to wreck, but such a long time to put right. Why couldn’t it be the other way around? It should hold up for the mosh pit at the Big Day Out anyway.