Random Play by Graham Reid

Like many people -- including most of the crowd in Eden Park, some of the television commentators, and not a few players it seemed -- I was baffled and then bemused by the end of the 20:20 cricket match between New Zealand and the West Indies.

Then again, I’ve never understood the Donald Duckworth System either, so maybe I’m not a reliable commentator.

But what baffled me was not the idea of cricket being played by a bowler without a batsman, but the need to settle on a winner.

Okay, the "bowl-off" was exciting and unintentionally hilarious, but a draw seemed a perfectly acceptable result -- and it’s not like cricket crowds are unused to such an outcome.

I remember reading the South Pacific edition of Time magazine at some time in the 70s and they did a cover story about the Ashes series. On a countback of the results it was shown that one third of the times Australia had won, another third England had won, and the other third … You guessed it.

Okay, money and not sport is what the 20:20 thing is about in all likelihood, so maybe that demanded a winner be settled on. But the need for one side to win is quite prevalent.

We saw it recently with that referendum in River Queen territory when people were asked to decide on whether Wanganui should change to the spelling -- the logical one when you consider its origins -- of Whanganui.

A vote was held and the locals who bothered with the ballot decided to stick with the name they had. Folks, we have a winner!

But on a television news item a reporter said that such debates about place names wasn’t new. The young journo cited the case of Mt Egmont which she said had originally been called Taranaki, then became Mt Egmont, and then became Taranaki again.

If memory serves me well that’s not exactly true.

Yes, it was (obviously) called Taranaki by local Maori, then it became Mt Egmont when the colonials arrived and then . . .

Well, the debate was on-going and lines were being drawn. But in a brilliant piece of lateral thinking the government of the day announced that people could call it what they preferred: if you knew it as Taranaki then that’s what it was, similarly if you’d always called it Mt Egmont then feel free to carry on.

It was an enlightened result and today that’s exactly what happens, although there has been a perceptible -- and inevitable -- shift towards Taranaki over the past couple of decades.

Rather than have a vote, the good citizens of Wanganui could have adopted that idea.

Oh, the people will cry, it would cost a fortune to have both.

That trivial problem doesn’t seem to worry many who took part in the Mt Egmont/Taranaki debate these days. Life just went on and both sides were satisfied. Still are it seems.

And it’s not like we can’t live with two parallel ideas: we comfortably shift between Imperial and metric measures (although we rarely heard the word “avoirdupois“ mentioned) and many of us -- not just people born in the 50s or before -- still use miles rather than kilometres.

(In Auckland however we are increasingly speaking of distances in hours.)

There seems no problem with incomprehension, it is all readily understood. “I’m five foot six and weigh 85 kilos, like long walks on beaches . . .”

We are used to juggling parallel concepts.

Is it a bach or a crib? Like the bathing suit/underwear ad on the tele, it depends on where you are standing at the time.

So maybe in our rush to find A Clear Result or Definitive Answer we are denying ourselves that capacity of holding two or more ideas simultaneously.

And to accept a draw -- which is actually a result, of course.

Just a thought. Or two.

You know how it is, you can go along with people for a little while -- indulging them even -- but then comes the tipping point. It’s the place where tragedy turns into farce, or rational actions suddenly become absurd. You walk away snickering.

There have been a couple of obvious tipping points in the past few days.

Who could not howl with laughter at the Reuters report that in Tehran some Iranians have taken to calling “Danish pastries” by a more politically appropriate name: “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad” apparently.

That right there is a tipping point. You just get a feeling that the outrage and street protests about the cartoons might be winding down now. Tragedy has turned to farce.

Protests will now morph into those against the abuse images coming through, although Danes are still being advised to leave Indonesia -- and presumably they should take their offensive cakes with them.

Another tipping point came halfway through the Herald front page article about the “eminent citizens” who have said they’ve had a gutsful of rubbish programmes on TVNZ.

Well, haven’t we all -- but, as far as I am aware, no one is sitting with a gun at our heads forcing us to watch it all. Yes, it takes some of our money but really, and it galls me a little to acknowledge this, it isn’t all rubbish.

And anyone who has watched state-sponsored television in other countries can tell you how bad that can be. Primetime viewing in Vietnam one night was a heart operation -- and they didn't even add dramatic music to the soundtrack in the manner of The Day My Boobs Went Bust.

But by and large you kind of agree with these eminent senior citizens -- who are obviously avid television watchers without remotes -- until you get to the line where Ian Johnstone, a former broadcaster, appears to bemoan the loss of McPhail and Gadsby and Close to Home.

That’s the tipping point, and the whole shebang was pushed right over the cliff when publisher Christine Cole Catley mentioned Upstairs Downstairs when interviewed on National Radio. What she sounded like she was arguing for was a return to colonial television about people in the Old Country who did things proper.

Yes, we should respect our elders and listen sometimes to their slightly archaic views -- but this was just getting absurd.

Soon they’ll be babbling on about The Planemakers, Bootsy and Snudge, The Donna Reed Show, Ironside, Supercar and Gumby.

We could all make a list of wonderful programmes of the Old Days --I’m for Lou Grant myself -- but when you see them on reruns most of them are embarrassing. Like the lady who recently returned to the library that long overdue Punch magazine observed, when you looked at it the humour in it, it just wasn’t that funny.

Geez, even Billy T didn’t seem quite as hilarious when his shows were replayed recently. And UK TV with its repeats of To The Manor Born, The Good Life and so on is more evidence for the defence.

Sorry eminent folks, we live in a whole new world and the old one isn’t coming back. Along with silence in libraries, getting dressed up to go to the movies, and saying “excuse me”, the world of McPhail and Gadsby has faded away.

I sympathise with the eminent citizens -- but more particularly people in retirement homes plonked in front of the idiot box every afternoon. Things just aren’t as good as they once were.

People are always complaining about something, young folk are rude and attached to cellphones, shop keepers don’t take the time to talk, and there’s quite a few of Johnny Foreigner on the streets these days.

I can understand why people prefer to live in the past. It was cheaper back then for a kick-off.

But goodness me is that the time already. Must be about time for that cup of tea and some cake.

Rose of the Prophet Muhammad, anyone?

In a shock announcement today the prime minister of Denmark told reporters that the current cartoon controversy had been a misguided attempt by a local newspaper publisher to raise the profile of the obscure Scandinavian country.

Denmark, a small, politically correct and astonishingly boring country of some six million polite citizens -- and two obnoxious death metal bands -- has seldom made international headlines, let alone been of any interest to people other than Danes.

It is frequently mistaken for Finland or Norway. Or Latvia.

Danish prime minister Dr Stig Rasmussensen has revealed that because of that confusion, since the late 90s a number of publishers and politicians have been sent on overseas fact-finding missions to look at ways of raising the country’s profile, and explore new modes of international dialogue.

It was as a result of a recent overseas mission that the current crisis has developed.

“Enquiries have shown,” said Dr Rasmussensen, “that the publisher in question had recently been on a trip to New Zealand and while there he was fascinated to learn of how towns in that country put themselves ‘on the map‘, as they said.

“I am told that a gumboot throwing competition, a cake bake-off and a country music festival put various small towns in New Zealand ‘on the map‘.

"We have since checked a number of atlases and to our surprise found that there they were, ‘on the map’. So the idea must work.

“We had never heard of this ‘on the map’ idea but brought it on board to study. The publication of the cartoons had been as a result of the publisher looking at ways to put Denmark ‘on the map‘.”

The prime minister added that the publisher admitted the paper had toyed with the idea of backing a major Danish comedy movie, but “our most successful comedies, like Italian For Beginners for example, weren’t actually that funny.”

“That film only did well at international film festivals because audiences were told in advance it was a comedy -- and so they laughed.”

According to Dr Rasmussensen the newspaper publisher opted for the cheaper option of commissioning a series of cartoons about an internationally recognizable figure -- the paper settled on Muhammad after rejecting Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald because of possible legal action -- in the hope that publishing images of a high profile figure in an amusing manner would put Denmark “on the map“.

“In that regard it was extremely successful, however there also appears to have been a downside. Danish humour once again seems to have gone past people.”

The publisher of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, Mr Voborg Mortensen, said he was not the only one to have been overseas and come back with new ideas: Denmark’s minister of sport had spent time in Australia discussing ways of introducing rugby to the nation which would then allow it to compete in forthcoming Rugby World Cup competitions.

Contacted for comment last night for his opinion about the cartoon incident the minister was candid and forthcoming.

“It was a big ask for these cartoonists but they had to back themselves and just go for it,” said sports minister Friis Arne Moller.

“They’d put in the hard yards and were looking for a result, and at the end of the day we’d have to say they were satisfied with their performance.

"Obviously there are still some outstanding issues, and they’ll focus on those in coming weeks.

“But right now they’ll take the win and be happy with having upped their performance. There will be an enquiry and we’ll be happy to wait for the outcome of that.

"Tonight they’ll probably be having a few quiet ones and thinking things over.”

Denmark’s foreign minister Ms Karen-Lise Mejding also acknowledged this week that she had spent considerable time in the Bronx and Brooklyn and, using what she had learned from that cross-cultural experience, expected to go to various Middle Eastern countries soon to talk directly with Muslim clerics and political leaders, which are essentially one and the same thing.

Clear dialogue was important to resolve the current situation, she said.

“Yo, and big props to my homies,” she said last night from a bar in downtown Roskilde.

“Word up, know wha-um sayin’. Dis shit wid the comic pictures ain’t no big thing, know wha-um sayin’. You got to get down wid dat shit, get it on with the project or ain’t nuttin’ gonna be get done.

“Nuff wid that shit, it’s time for peoples to be gettin’ it all together, and don’t be messin’ wid the negative now.

"Take it to the next level, know wha-um sayin’. Time to cool it all down, I’m talkin’ ‘bout respect.

“So to all my Muslim brudders I just want to say we givin’ big-ups to you all. Ain‘t no bad thing. We all is speaking to you live and direct coz we don’t want no problem in the hood.

“No misunderstanin’ now. You is da bomb and we is da bomb. So lock and load, know wha-um sayin‘. Represent.

“To you all Islamist peoples I be sayin‘: peace muthafuggers.”

Want to know what the best thing is on my television right now? Okay, it’s a rhetorical question so I’m going to flip all the cards and tell you anyway: it’s the My Sky box which sits on top of it.

This is the new technology available from Sky which allows you to pause television programmes, record three programmes simultaneously, rewind and fast forward like a DVD (better in fact, there are lots of speed options), and much else besides.

Russell Brown has written about it in the current Listener so there’s no need to get into all its terrificness again, although like one of his kids I did wonder why I couldn’t fast forward through programmes being beamed out live.

But that tells you how seductively convenient this easy-to-operate thing is.

It is the best thing I’ve plugged into a television since the DVD player at least a dozen years ago and it’s my new favourite techno-device -- especially as we have a railway line nearby and can now pause the news or whatever when one of those things with Nedlloyd containers goes rumbling past.

What interests me however is how print media television reviewers and "critics" will respond to this innovation which allows effortless time-shifting for the home viewer.

Newspapers and magazines seem to me to be woefully far behind the changes in how people watch -- use? -- television these days.

I live in an apartment block where perhaps 18 out of the 20 people have a Sky decoder on their roof, and you only have to drive around the suburbs of major cities -- or even through the provinces -- to see these things poking out the sides of houses everywhere, regardless of their residents’ socio-economic status.

That is, the poor and rich alike have got Sky.

At the end of June last year Sky had 619,168 subscribers – and of that approximately 70,000 subscribed to the multi-multi-channel UHFservice. Around 40% of households in the country have Sky.

And I guess if they’ve got it, they’re using it.

Yet television reviewers are still locked in to the whole One-2-Three vortex.

But the time has long gone when people could stand around the water cooler or in the lunchroom and talk about what was on the tele last night, and assume everyone had seen the same thing.

If people are watching television -- and many, despite what the various media think, aren’t -- we can’t assume they are all hunkered down before Fair Go or The Day My Boobs Went Bust.

I’m no tele-snob, but I’ve never seen a Desperate Housewives. The reason being I have always had a whole lot of other choices -- and now even more because I’ve recorded Dodgeball (“very funny film“ is a line which makes more sense when you‘ve seen the Extras episode with Ben Stiller), a doco about the real Spartacus, My Name is Earl and that terrific 1949 movie The Fountainhead in which Gary Cooper plays an idealistic architect caught between Modernism, idealism and trying to make a living. (True, it’s a gem!)

So, like many people I am spoiled for choice. One of my choices may, of course, be to watch Desperate Housewives -- but maybe at a different time on a different day.

Television has increasingly become something you use rather than are a slave to.

Yet television reviewing has conspicuously failed to account for this. Still we get reviews/previews of shows which hardly need further comment. (Coronation Street for God‘s sake?) And does anyone really need yet another piece about Shortland Street?

These are the kinds of long-running shows you’ve either decided to watch, or not. Either way, they don’t need writing about.

Many newspapers overseas simply have a soap-watch column where a paragraph is dedicated to a synopsis of the week for those who happened to miss the show. Or were watching Desperate Housewives or Dodgeball or . . .

Many years ago -- and repeatedly since then -- I argued when I could for a new way of reviewing or writing about television. I mooted the idea of a column (which I called Scanners to account for how people use their tv) which would not be a review/preview column whose contents seemed determined by PR people in One, 2 or Three.

Such a column could look at the odd conjunctions you can find by trawing the channels (The Shoes of the Fisherman with Anthony Quinn as a Pope screening at the time John Paul II moved on), point to the oddball or enlightening corners of the many options available, consider programmes on the Maori channel as of equal weight as The World‘s Greatest Autopsies, and note aspects of news coverage (at home and abroad) worthy of praise or condemnation.

It would be a column enthusiastic about the medium and not elitist. It would embrace television in all its absurdity when necessary (whiny kids of minor league US celebs on a cattle drive? Who woulda thought?), but also be serious when required.

Most importantly though, it would ENJOY television.

Many reviews these days read as if they are by someone who feels writing about television is beneath them and they should be doing something more serious. (Or worse, sound like they want to be writing for television because they know a whole lot better.)

I guess it is in no channel’s best interests that their advertisers know the audience is either muting, moving on or not even watching that show in the first place. Yet the myth of the loyal viewer locked in to a channel or a particular show is perpetrated by the print media and PR departments which collude in pretending that nothing has changed in the past decade.

But so much has.

Right now if you are vaguely interested in the debate about political/satirical cartoons in newspapers you are hardly going to go to Susan Wood or John Campbell for the bigger picture. The time constraints of their bite-sized segments barely allow the protagonists to air their side.

Nope, you go straight to CNN or BBC World where the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten's culture editor Flemming Rose was there to be (uncomfortably) cross-examined and defend his choices.

When the big stories break it’s “not about us”, it’s about the people with access -- and generally we don’t have it so that’s why we look elsewhere.

Of course you might not give a flying Fox about such weighty issues and just want to chug beers on the couch. Fair enough. So there are movie channels, the E! Hollywood True Story things, a food channel, UK TV (anyone else spotted The Keith Barret Show, a kind of Alan Partridge-lite character on an interview show and executive produced by Steve Coogan?), the Discovery Channel, profiles on the History channel . . .

For $600 Sky subscribers, already used to flicking through the options when they are supposed to be watching One or Three, are now -- even more than before -- making their own arrangements.

It’s a whole new world and it might be time reviewers caught up and abandoned the convenient and comfortable fiction that tonight we‘ll all be watching Lost.

"Scanners". It’s all about us.

Pet lovers are expected to mount nationwide protests with the news that the Preservation of Indigenous Animal Species Bill will be pushed through Parliament in the next few days.

The controversial bill has provisions which allow for the progressive eradication of all exotic animals which includes cats, dogs, budgies and horses.

Domestic chickens and ducks will also be eradicated and only those in officially sanctioned and monitored farms will be allowed to survive and breed in rigidly controlled isolation.

While many pet owners have been taken by surprise at the speed with which the bill has appeared before the House, supporters say the necessary consultative process was followed scrupulously and that legislation is necessary to protect native animals.

“New Zealand is overrun with exotic animals and pets,” says zoologist Dr Roy Armstrong, “and rare native species are threatened with extinction by this hostile environment.

“What people don’t understand is that the ecosystem in this country is highly fragile and just one feral cat -- or even a young domesticated one -- can take at least a dozen native birds in a single month.

“Multiply that by thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and you can see the problem.

“It is not a solution anyone enjoys, but the eradication of domestic pets is an essential first step in ensuring the survival of native species. After that has been achieved, and I think the projection that all cats, dogs and horses will be gone by the end of 2007 is quite achievable, then we can move on to cattle, sheep and rabbits.”

Support for the Bill -- brought to the house by Green List MP Valerie Kingwoman -- has also come from those concerned with border bio-security.

In the past decade it is believed 42 new species of spiders arrived in the country, usually in containers from Australia, and fears about the bird-borne avian flu and “Mad Cow” disease have also fuelled calls for the eradication of all exotic species.

It is believed the first effect of the bill will be the compulsory acquisition of all domestic animals which will be terminated through special units local councils will establish with a $32 million seeding grant from the government.

The Minister for the Environment and Whale-Watching Stephen Palmer said last week the new bill was a natural consequence of the measures currently being taken against pest plants and weeds which has seen the banning from sale of various kinds of palms, those pretty agapanthus on roadsides and in gardens, and noxious weeds such as old man’s beard.

“If we are going to pay full respect to the native fauna and flora of Aotearoa then these are essential measures. There will be a bedding-in period when it comes to the compulsory acquisition of all domestic pets but after that time we will prosecute to the full extent of the law anyone caught harbouring offending animals like kittens, puppies, guinea pigs, horses and so on.”

Support for the move against imported plants and animals -- which have been declared illegal under new provisions in the amended Biosecurity Act passed last month -- has come from some unexpected quarters.

In a meeting at the Orewa Lions Club on Saturday prominent members of National, New Zealand First and the National Front were quick to suggest the provisions of the bill be extended to members of exotic immigrant communities.

“Some will call this racist I am sure,” said one member of New Zealand’s National Front who did not want to be identified, “but you have to look at these things in a cool and logical manner.

“The exotic plants were a problem so we ripped them out, and the exotic animals are a menace so we have procedures in place for their humane eradication. The tell-on-a-traitor campaign worked well in the plants issue and we had any number of people coming forward to identify neighbours, friends or family members who still had a phoenix palm or English ivy in their gardens.

“It was especially gratifying that children were prepared to inform the authorities if their parents or caregivers were offending in this manner.

“I am sure the same patriotic energy will apply to the eradication of noxious imported animals, and immigrants.

“Given the right set of social conditions -- and targeted education of the young -- we could quickly identify and isolate migrant communities and then formulate a humane series of protocols for their deportation.

"Or whatever other procedure we deem necessary at that time to deal with them.”