Hard News: Gay, but really not happy
99 Responses
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Ok, I'll admit this post is mainly so I can see if my Gravatar works (pleasepleaseplease)
But I'll also say this: I am never surprised to Maori TV doing something well. Ever since they started I've impressed by their scheduling decisions and content.
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Yay gravatar!
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Colin? Colin the cat?
I see... named after some wacky artist or other...
Naming conventions for pets is a tricky beast - I am about to become the proud posessor of two guinea pigs and I'm concerned that a: they'll die quickly and leave me with two bereft blubbering children and b: they'll be named Bubbles and FooFoo or similar.
And yet I'm reliably told I won't get much of a say in the naming. How can I combat this? What have other parents done (the Short List of Acceptable Names? The introducing of pets Already Named?)? What works?
Meanwhile, I detected a brief bout of this phenomenon:
on the YouTube footage. Fi, was that you?
Oh, should I say something about homosexuality? Erm... Colin the cat. No, that's all I've got.
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I have sympathy with the gay community over the quality of TVNZ programming. It has declined over recent times in all areas.
Let us hope the Tony Holden's departure will take us away from second-rate American drama and endless meaningless reality shows with people like John Banks airing their prejudices for everyone who has a stomach for it to see.Some of the programming put on after 11.pm is all that makes it worth while some excellent dramas and a couple of Sunday's ago a really good documentary on Dyslexia that started at 11.30 and finished at about 1.30am. I know it is not politically correct to label people with a condition but if the estimates of people affected by Dyslexia are only half true then surely this excellent documentary was worth some prime viewing time. On the same evening during the 6.30 to 7.30 spot we were subjected to yet another “location ,location ,location” surely we have uncovered all the secrets of property purchasing?
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Leo's profile on YouTube says he's 35... :-)
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How can I combat this? What have other parents done?
I vetoed the "Naming it after the other dog that I used to own that got run over by a truck" first off. That was going to be way too much.
I went for a "we both have to agree on the name of the animal" approach. But of course, there's only two of us. If there were two adults and three children, life would have been much more difficult.
If they're guinea pigs, then they're little fluffy things that'll die within a year, and it probably doesn't matter if they're named 'Fluffy 1' and 'Fluffy 2'. Dogs, cats, horses etc should be taken seriously, the rest are just rodents that we're agreeing not to poison this week.
As for the gay community - they don't feel fully represented by 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'? Man, some people are so demanding.
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One of my main objections to the "reality tv" concept around this bit of progamming is that it's basically giving free taxpayer funded advertising to one branch of the gay media.most of express' foreign copy is lifted striaght off the net, and the local staff has so little journalistic ability the paper is often an embarassment, half full of advertorials.
NZ has a few more gay publications than express, why don't they get the same advantages?
No one has answered the question as to whether express is actually being paid or recompensed in any way for taking part - I sincerely hope not.
But it'll just be another piece of shite that is supposed to 'represent' the gay world. *sigh*
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Mr Holden seems to have left some carnage- or at least baggage- in the Shortland St hallways... But I don't think it's just him: the combined pressure of falling ratings and "the charter" have induced a cycle of chaos at tvnz that seems to feedback onto itself. In terms of sport- an NZ biggie- they're as marginalised as the gay community. They're not getting the big dramas "as of right" anymore- with sky/prime (and to some extent canwest) able to feed on programmes they or other branches of the same outfit have acquired rights for in other territories- and perhaps lacking some of the top programmers- much of the best drama (deadwood- shameless-dr who) is going elsewhere. And because they're still a blinkin' big, quite rigid and top-heavy institution, they make less news and current affairs for the dollar and it's often not as good. (There's nothing like being an independent, and knowing getting your next job hinges completely on your current job being a cracker, to keep you honed in on quality. Quite different from the life of a salaried producer.) It's kind've sad to watch.
Somewhat off-topic and with regard to this from the "executive summary":In terms of labels, ‘Gay’ is the most preferred label; however there is a great deal of pain and annoyance caused by
the term being used in a derogatory way “that’s so gay”.Isn't what's happened to the word "gay" in my/our lifetimes extraordinary? From "blythe and carefree" to "homosexual- in a nice way" to "boring, and somehow slightly off"- a remarkable lexical journey, that sez a lot about a/ social engineering and its pitfalls and b/ the enduring power of prejudice. I'm still missing having a word for the original meaning- while my teenage kids are unintentionally re-inforcing anti-gay stereotypes with their everyday usage. I know getting annoyed about it- or the routine rubbishing of the language that is msn messenger and txt-spk- makes me an old fogey and pedant. But Hrrmmmph! anyway.
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Once again it's more inaccurate reporting Michael perpetuated by the same rumour mill I'm sure which is suprising for a blog called "Hard News". But I'm not going to bother going into the inaccuracies - except the part that relates personally to me. I most certainly did not learn my trade from Julie Christie - she brought me to New Zealand from the UK where I'd enjoyed a successful career both as a producer and developer and as the editor of two ABC accredited gay publications.
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What about shows for all the straight white property-owners out there? How come no one ever makes shows for us????!!!!!
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I most certainly did not learn my trade from Julie Christie - she brought me to New Zealand from the UK where I'd enjoyed a successful career both as a producer and developer and as the editor of two ABC accredited gay publications.
My apologies, Glen. I have just updated the original post along those lines (before reading your comment). But I was contacted by a number of people I tend to trust before writing it, and I'm in no doubt that this is a real issue for for the community. If there is anything else with which you take issue, I'd be grateful if you could either discuss it here or click the envelope icon below my name to the left there.
I think part of the problem is that Express is increasingly seen within the community as very flimsy itself, so a decision to view gay New Zealand through the window of the newspaper was always going to be controversial.
Maybe your programme will defy the expectations of critics, but given what's been hurled at the community in the past couple of years you can hardly blame people for being extremely sceptical about the idea of a reality show.
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If they're guinea pigs, then they're little fluffy things that'll die within a year, and it probably doesn't matter if they're named 'Fluffy 1' and 'Fluffy 2'.
That is so spooky. The motivation for getting the cat was the traumatic disappearance (possibly at the hands of an enterprising dog in the night) of our guinea pig. Leo was extremely distressed about it (but we did get some video which he will hopefully choose to upload).
And the guinea pig's name was ... Fluffy ....
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Hey, my guinea pig's name was Fluffy too. That's going back 30 years of course, but perhaps they're related. :p
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Thanks for that Russell. I'm not going to get into specifics here but I hope that things will be clarified about the contents of the show within the next couple of days when we officially go on the record (although even then we're not going to reveal all the details as there has to be some suprises for viewers and this is after all, a very competitive industry).
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Leo's profile on YouTube says he's 35... :-)
He has learned that stating your real age when signing up for stuff can mean someone spoiling the fun. He's also quite good at entering random gibberish when prompted for unwarranted address and phone number details.
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Oddly enough, Maori TV is doing this, on a fraction of the budget. Takataapui, "the only show for gay, lesbian and transsexual Maori", actually covers real stories - things that actually matter to the community, like the closure of Herne Bay House. There is no shortage of skills or motivation to make a sensible programme for the gay community. But what TVNZ wants seems anything but sensible.
Well, dare I say it, but could it be that MTS aren't exactly awash in production money (and have a certain siege mentality that whitey are out to get 'em anyway) so they just can't afford to green-light any half-arsed nonsense to fluff the local content hours, and minority checklist, that keeps the Charter cash flowing. (That's not to say it hasn't turned out some crap - it takes some perverse genius to make Hori Ahipene & Te Radar boring, but it happened. Still. it's hard not to argue they're doing more with less. The strangely hypnotic Ask Your Auntie is more interesting, and informative, than the back half of the news hour on Three or TVNZ.)
Here's the nice thing about living with a gay man who's been around a lot longer than you have: He remembers what it was like long before law reform where anything in the media with even a hint of gay or lesbian subtext was grasped with both hands for pretty obvious reasons. Now, you can mince down to Whitcoulls and pick up gay/lesbian-themed magazines, novels and DVDs they would have been prosecuted for even trying to import thirty years ago.
Sorry, girls, putting a NZ flag and a red ribbon on a pig doesn't mean you can take 'the community' for granted.
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Paul said - "And yet I'm reliably told I won't get much of a say in the naming. How can I combat this? What have other parents done (the Short List of Acceptable Names? The introducing of pets Already Named?)? What works?"
Paul - an interesting topic. In my experience, the short-list of acceptable names is the best way to go - gives you the opportunity to combat "Princess", "Sunshine", and "Angel" with cooler names of your own like "Jet" and "Flash". Also helps if you can choose the pet gender first ("sorry honey, we can't call a boy 'Princess').
After the name calling, inevtiably comes the problem of dealing with pet death - my 5 year old daughter was quite excited to point out that one of the mantises in her bug-catcher was biting the other over the weekend, I didn't have the heart to point out that the mantis was actually consuming the other.
Oh, and make sure the two guinea-pigs are separate gender, or you'll soon have lots and lots of little fluffies ..... almost like Tribbles.
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3410,
Good point, RB, but really just one aspect of a wider problem. Gay people are surely getting short-changed, but who isn’t? Outside of Wells’ programmes, TVNZ’s local content is entirely irrelevant to my life.
It really is a stunning situation that genuinely brilliant creative artists in Auckland (and elsewhere, no doubt) struggle, literally going hungry for years, while TVNZ flushes $600,000 down the toilet over a project that we could all see was seriously misguided from the start (what is that anyway, $200 per hour for 3000 hours of writing??!).
I’ve worked in television. It’s not rocket science; it’s not magic. $600k for “script development” of a tacky soap in a country of 4 million people is an absolute disgrace, even if they had managed to get to air with it.
If TVNZ is not fulfilling its charter obligations – as seems the case – relevant Ministers need to stop fretting about accusations of “political interference” and do something about it. As it is, the TVNZ executives and the content providers who have them in their pockets are like Soviet Generals stuffing themselves with state-funded caviar, while the populace queues all day for stale bread.
[O/T, but next time you get the site worked on, how about making the "preview" function automatically scroll to the bottom of the page, since it is, by definition, necessary to do this anyway.]
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3410,
Well, dare I say it, but could it be that MTS aren't exactly awash in production money...
When I dealt with them "awash in production money" is exactly what they were.
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Also helps if you can choose the pet gender first
Agree, I myself was on the receiving end of: "Sorry Honey, she's a girl, so you can't call her Buster Crabbe".
Bummer.
Oh, and make sure the two guinea-pigs are separate gender, or you'll soon have lots and lots of little fluffies ..... almost like Tribbles
True, you need to be able to separate boys & girls for long periods of time, they will literally mate & reproduce (the sows go on heat the moment they have given birth) until the sows die of exhaustion.
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Leo's profile on YouTube says he's 35...
Young Ones mode on
But can he drink in pubs?
Young Ones mode off
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But can he drink in pubs?
No, but I daresay that given sufficient provocation he'd be willing to fight you.
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Posted on You Tube? ;)
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Express is SO Auckland-biased that there's little relevance for anyone in the rest of the country, especially if you are not a drag-queen-obsessed scene-freak satyromaniac narcissist. But then you can accurately say that about 90% of New Zealand media (well, possibly not the "drag-queen-obsessed scene-freak satyromaniac narcissist" bit - but then again...)
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Does anyone else notice the juxtaposition of conversations going on in this thread?
1. Gay-friendly programming on TV should be much better.
2. You can't call a male guinea pig "Princess"
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