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In memoriam, Terry Gray, British-born New Zealand composer, 1940–2011
I sincerely hope I’m wrong when I say that the passing of Kiwi composer, arranger and conductor Terry Gray went unnoticed in our news media. I only found out last month that Terry died in 2011. As...
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A letter from composer Terry Gray, 1991
What a coincidence to come across a letter from composer, arranger, conductor and former TVNZ bandleader Terry Gray, dated May 25, 1991, after I blogged about him on (nearly) the seventh anniversary of...
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Forced to take prime-time nostalgia trips
‘There’s an old Polish proverb …’ I believe it’s ‘Reality television can’t stop the motorways in Warsaw from getting icy.’ I’ve always known what sort of telly I liked, and often that was at odds with...
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One News is hard to miss on TV, but hidden on the internet
I wanted to see what TV1 news (I can never remember its official name with all its rebrands over the years—is it One Network News, TVNZ1 News, One News, or something else?) had on GM’s decision to shut...
View ArticleAn update on yesterday’s COVID-19 table
Another late-night calculation of COVID-19 cases as a proportion of total tests done, so the figures will be out of date again, and I’ve also discovered that the total testing numbers some countries...
View ArticleFacebook exploits COVID-19 for profit, and viral thoughts
A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020...
View ArticleCautiously optimistic about Boucher
When I ran for office, there was often a noticeable difference between how I was treated by locally owned media and foreign- owned media. There are exceptions to that rule—The New Zealand Herald and...
View ArticleI can finally identify with the main character in a New Zealand TV show
While I care much more about when John Simm will grace our screens again (pun intended), it was hard to avoid the reality TV that gets beamed into our living rooms during prime-time. There is the...
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Nostalgia: Money for Nothing
Money for Nothing—image from Amazon Prime, where, as of yesterday, you can watch a presumably cleaner copy than what’s on YouTube. As a young lad, I enjoyed the Screen One TV movie Money for Nothing...
View ArticleTo our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air
Above: Sunday host Miriama Kamo. [Originally published in Lucire] To our colleagues at Television New Zealand’s Sunday, including Lucire alum Mava Moayyed, we bid you godspeed and good luck. Your...
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