Chatting to TV, radio and internet journalists for the mayoral campaign
Share There have been a few times in the history of this blog where I stepped away from writing regularly. At the end of 2006, I had a pretty good excuse: I was in France. This time, my reasons for...
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Endorsements from Sir Michael Fowler and others—and why the Paul Henry...
Share Yesterday, as some of you know, Sir Michael Fowler endorsed me, saying that I am the ‘intelligent’ mayoral candidate and he likes the programme I have outlined for our city. It goes beyond what...
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The other time Paul Henry had it in for someone with Indian heritage
Share Paul Henry isn’t alone on this: a lot of New Zealand media have been making fun of Delhi Chief Minister Smt. Sheila Dikshit’s surname, purposely mispronouncing it as dick-shit and then giggling...
View ArticlePaul Henry resigns
Share I’ve had a long 54 weeks, so I will leave it to Paikea to say what needs to be said about Paul Henry’s decision to resign from Breakfast. She is a lot more succinct than me and her three bullet...
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Fax and text spam: bad marketing moves
Share Above I’d mention the war, but Honda was founded after the surrender. I despise fax-spam, and under my reading of the Telecommunications Act, these come under nuisance calls. But regardless of...
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Wellington Airport flip-flops again, but pennies drop more quickly in Queensland
Share Today, those of us on the anti-‘Wellywood’ sign page got some welcome news: that Wellington Airport would reconsider. But, I had to point out, this is again déjà vu. Last time, the Airport...
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Twenty years on, the Hong Kong handover reminds us how impotent Britain...
Share Hong Kong’s skyline in 2008, photographed by Scrolllock. Has it been 20 years since Dad and I sat in front of the telly to watch both Britannia sail out of the harbour and China set off a...
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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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