Culture

Column comment

The first in a most irregular series.

Russell Brown™ has posted a note about us on Public Address, therefore we exist. But what does he mean by calling us ‘solid’? He can talk.

Brown’s Wide Area News is worth getting the Listener for (plus you get Jane Clifton, whose new book Political Animals is very funny). He’s changed the nature of media columns: there’s as much if not more reportage than comment. It’s no longer good enough just to read the papers, watch the news and write a column about it. You have to tell the reader something they didn’t know.

Which brings us to veteran journalist Jim Mahoney, editor of Truth, who came out fighting with a robust response to Warwick Roger’s North and South media column about the venerable weekly: ‘His remaining readers will not be surprised by his excessive use of the first person singular… [His] career has been distinguished, if that is the right word, by cheap shots at fellow journalists.’ And there’s more, in an open letter to the magazine’s editor combative form on Michael Moore, the director of what Mark Steyn, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Hitchens, calls crockumentaries:

‘I was invited by Michael Moore to be his interviewer at the Telluride Film Festival for his awful, baggy, dishonest, boring movie, Bowling for Columbine. In that film, clips about the Kosovo war from Serbian television are used as objective. Moore implies that the bombing of Kosovo might have inspired the murderers in Columbine. You don’t know where to start with someone as mentally lazy as this. This was on the anniversary of September 11 terrorist attacks, and he said, “Well, if it’s true that bin Laden did this thing in New York...” It was early in the morning; just a second, I thought. “Say that again? If they did this?” He said, “Well, if they did this.” And he opposed the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan—a reactionary, conservative position couched in radical anti-imperialist language…

‘He says he considers the Iraqi resistance—the beheaders and kidnappers and rapists, the people who throw petrol and explosives into the mosques of rival Muslims, among other things—the equivalents of the Minutemen of the American Revolution. This is the statement of a flat-out Brownshirt. It has to be described as such. And all the people who thought that was a great movie to rock the vote, they should be fucking ashamed. There is no room for compromising on a thing like this. He’s a lying, fascist, thug.’

Finally, Alex Ross, the New Yo rker’s music critic, recommended Evan Eisenberg’s The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, so I bought it. It has lots to say about why men (it’s almost always men) obsessively collect recordings, and how we all listen to music differently now that it’s not a special occasion each time. A couple of centuries ago you had to be a wealthy aristocrat and employ Haydn and an orchestra if you wanted to hear music whenever you wanted. Even public concerts are relatively new. Now, he says, thanks to CDs or your iPod you can ‘hear nocturnes at breakfast, vespers at noon and the Easter Oratorio on Chanukah. [You can do the] morning crossword to the “One O’Clock Jump” and make love right though the St Matthew Passion.’

Now that’s just showing off. Because I am the sort of person Ross describes, I could quickly ascertain that ‘One O’Clock Jump’ (Count Basie, Decca, 1937) lasts for three minutes and one second, and that the St Matthew Passion (John Eliot Gardiner, DGG, 1989) lasts for two hours and 38 minutes. The crossword in three minutes and a shag for two and a half hours? Yeah right. Even in New York.

Not too much. Yet

More reality TV? About the search for a new singer for the in-hiatus Oz-rock outfit INXS? Hey, if it works, and Rock Star: INXS kind of works, you gotta embrace it.

Put to one side, please, the always weird display of instant let’s-party enthusiasm and public camaraderie that these programmes seem to foster in the contestants. Forget their beautifully lit and styled intro portraits, making them always preternaturally relaxed and hip. Ignore the dispiriting case of yet another band of aging rockers who won’t (literally, in this case) give up the ghost but instead embrace the current suspension of the traditional rock=young coolness paradigm, and you have the makings of a vaguely compelling show.

Out of the same stable that brought you the dog-tired but ruthlessly slapped back into life Survivor/The Apprentice franchises, Rock Star: INXS has 15 wannabes squawking and strutting to win the right to replace Michael Hutchence. They’ve got names like Ty and Wil and JD and Jordis. They’re mostly north Americans, and all but one are pretty white people. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that eight of the 15 are women. All of them can sing, and all can perform on stage in front of 1000 ready-baked fans. Well, one got a little bit too Boyzone with an Asian audience member, and another had a little fit in lieu of coordinated dance moves. One went too high and too low on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. One forgot her words.

But it was Dana, who looks like a young Kyra Sedgwick (there’s also a young Willem Defoe and Richard Ashcroft), who got booted out the Rock Star mansion for screeching. Dana sang Knocking on Heaven’s Door, but had an attack of the banshees towards the end. This desecration of an untouchable classic fatally offended the INXSers and Dave Navarro, who had been to that point forcing themselves to nod heads and tap toes while clearly inwardly grimacing.

Dana should be fine. She’s got a band, and if it doesn’t pan out she can fall back on her showgirl and adult cable acting credits, at least according to the official site. The profiles are great, but don’t linger, as the site gives some of the game away.

The best bits of these shows are the bit when the freaks come out to play. Daphna (not to be confused with Dana) had a toe-curling wail about her recently deceased father. I’m all for showing grief, but was this really the time and place? If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no TV-grade video camera to film it, did it really happen?

Scan and pan: The Mark Steel Lectures

The Arts Channel on Monday night at 18:00 or on Tuesday lunchtime at 12:10. Where else on New Zealand television could you find Lord Byron in the guise of Paul Simonon from the cover art of London Calling by The Clash; or Isaac Newton as Carol Vorderman; or Charles Darwin as the nutter from Close Encounters of the Third Kind? But, let’s be honest, there can’t be more than a handful of people in New Zealand watching the Mark Steel Lectures, can there?

It’s nothing short of a cultural calamity that this BBC Four and Open University co-production — which won Mark a Royal Television Society award for Best Entertainment Performance and went on to be shown on BBC Two and the UK’s History Channel — is tucked away on pay TV. But that’s not the Arts Channel’s fault. Good on them for discovering (or, at least, stumbling upon) Mark Steel and buying both series of ‘Great Thinkers’, but it’s still a pity most people may never see them.

Steel is a British comedian, newspaper columnist and author. He presented a BBC Radio Four series of lectures on famous people, but there are rumours Steel subsequently fell out with the radio station and that his web page was therefore removed from the BBC site.

He says he started his working life as a TV repairman, and won several competitions in the industry magazine for the best joke anyone had told when they couldn’t fix some poor bugger’s telly. He graduated from the comedy club circuit and toured Britain with his one-man show. Steel hosts his own Radio 4 series, The Mark Steel Solution, is regularly a guest on Radio 4’s Loose Ends and various other TV and radio programmes. He’s also written regular columns for the Guardian, the UK Independent (on topics such as global poverty, the free market and Mariah Carey) and the Socialist Worker.

There’s a potted history of Steel’s pre-‘Great Thinkers’ work on the web, and a number of short biographies, including this one. Wikipedia’s entry says he was sacked by the Guardian newspaper because, according to Steel they wanted to “realign towards Tony Blair”. The Guardian denies this. His agent has a site that incorporates some of Steel’s writings.

Conceptually, ‘Great Thinkers’ doesn’t seem all that revolutionary, but it really does make for a TV experience unlike any other. The parts of the thinkers are played by extraordinarily low-key actors, recreating scenes from their lives in a present day environment, with only their occasionally outlandish costumes, modern props and passers-by to help them suspend our disbelief. Lord Byron, for example, wore a wonderfully camp suit that looked as though it’s been cut from a Turkish rug, and devices such as laptops, fax machines and mobile phones furnished the vignettes, intercut with Steel’s digressionary ‘stand-up’ narration in his laddish, London style. And so we have Mary Shelley at a PC in a gothic Siouxsie of the Banshees get-up, and a Ludwig van Beethoven who’s woefully dependent on TV’s teletext subtitle service.

[My original post referred erroneously to ‘Alfred’ Lord Byron. Do-oh! There has never in fact been an industry stipulation that peer poets must be called Alfred, although 1st Baron Tennyson was one. Byron, of course, was George. George Gordon Noel Byron.]

The full line-up of subjects for Steel’s first series was Lord Byron, Sir Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud, Aristotle, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. The second series featured Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Paine (did you know Paine wrote two of the world’s best-selling books of his day?), Sylvia Pankhurst and Mary Shelley.

The Pankhurst episode explained how she ended up living in Ethiopia as a Rastafarian sympathiser and became Haile Selassie’s “advisor on policies for women”. One of the funniest moments came towards the end of the Shelley episode, when the irate teenage author bellowed at the camera, “Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the fucking monster!”

These lectures are part of the Open University’s course material, but Steel doesn’t expect watching his shows to earn you a degree, or to hasten your studies in philosophy. In an interview at the Mark Steel Lectures site he concedes, “If you want to know a lot about these people you're going to have to do more than to watch my programmes.” Nevertheless, there’s a serious intent behind ‘Great Thinkers’ and, having seen all the episodes, I can say that every one contains a number of surprising facts about the subject, bolstered by plenty of fake tabloid headlines, street and shop signs and in-jokes — some fly by so fast that you find yourself reaching for the non-existent freeze-frame button on your remote to savour the moment.

To research each thinker, Steel explains, he’d start by reading a beginner’s book to get to know the parameters of the subject’s life and then follow-up with whatever biographies he could find — not really the sort of material you imagine would detain many stand-up comics. “The thing with reading is just that most people don’t have the time, and you can read a 400-page book in a day, if you have to. The reason why 400-page books usually take months to read is that you’re trying to do it in and out of going to work, looking after kids, and so on. But if you sit down in the morning and take it bit by bit, over a period of about eight days you can read quite a lot of stuff.”

So, do the Mark Steel Lectures justify an Arts Channel subscription? Well, not quite. There’s still far too much ballet and opera between the good bits for my liking, and not enough literature and the visual arts. Only about ten per cent of the programming is honestly watchable, and much of the music coverage is hideously outdated. There was a Bill Frisell documentary recently that was so good that it had me hunting downloads of his music on the web, but it was sadly a rare exception. And the Steel lectures make up only 30 minutes a week, unless you watch the repeats — which you may feel like doing. Still, the “price of a cup of coffee a week” campaign the Arts Channel ran prior to its paid launch really doesn’t stand up as a justification to subscribe.

So you may have to wait for the DVDs; but don’t hold your breath. As with so much of the kind of TV and film output that doesn’t cater to the mass market and which isn’t likely to sell in the hundreds of thousands, there’s a groundswell of opinion asking for the Mark Steel Lectures to be released on DVD, but it doesn’t appear that the rights owners are listening. There was much more widespread support for the release of the entire second season of Twin Peaks on DVD, which still isn’t out because the rights owners say a release isn’t economically viable. That debate has been raging since 2001, so one is forced to wonder how much (if any) notice is taken of forums and internet chatter.

There’s no word yet on whether Steel is planning a third series, but he seems to have enjoyed the experience of studying the first 12 thinkers so much that I don’t feel the need to keep my fingers crossed until he’s compiled a further list of nutcases. “Most of these people are so nutty they come at you fairly easily,” he says.

Scan and pan: Huff

Life. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of it. And sometimes, when you do, you feel like Russell in Huff.

I’m always giving my friends a hard time about not liking things and not being able to articulate why. And so I should probably explain why it is that I liked Huff so much, the “dark new comedy” starring Hank Azaria as psychiatrist Dr Craig “Huff” Huffstodt that’s just finished its first run on TV One. (Listening to the show’s characters, I’d always assumed that surname would be spelled Huffstadt. US pronunciation — go figure).

The appeal of this show, even from its trailers, was the prospect of seeing Hank Azaria in an extended role. He’s responsible for so many of the great voices on The Simpsons and I enjoyed him as Claude the English-mangling scuba instructor in the otherwise pedestrian 2004 Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston vehicle Along Came Polly.

I also have a soft-spot for the underdog and an irrational dislike of almost anything with mass-market appeal. Viewing figures for Huff in the States were disappointing. In spite of a massive marketing campaign, the show premiered to an audience of around 456,000 viewers. Only about five per cent of the posts on the Television Without Pity forum about the show are positive. (And, incidentally, some mighty strange conclusions are drawn there about the 13th episode’s climax, when Huff pushes his best friend Russell down the stairs for sleeping with his mother. These folks seem incapable of understanding why he was so riled. “He’s tolerated far more personal outrages with great equanimity,” reckons WasabiDog. “Yeah, like the guy who kept parking in his space,” says Toggle Switch. That about sums up the Americans: having your parking space stolen is worse than your best friend plooking your mother. Are they trying to be ironic?)

TV One could have given its own Huff viewing figures a temporary and artificial boost by flagging the final episode of this show a week in advance. But no, it finished abruptly in New Zealand, on Tuesday 19 July 2005, and the first we knew about it was when the tortuously good-humoured, standard TV One voice-over man boomed over the final credits: “That was the final episode of Huff on One, and so far there’s no word from the producers about a follow-up.”

Well, a great deal was made in the US media about the fact that Huff was granted a second season before the first show had even premiered. But don’t bother looking on the makers’ website for clarification. “Sorry,” says a message when you click on the link for Showtime Announcements at Google. “We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.” Well, thanks a lot. Why? Do they think they’re going to spoil it for the rest of us? Or is this the internet equivalent of DVD zoning?

It was never clear from TV One’s scheduling whether the 13 episodes we’ve now seen were the combined first and second seasons or just the first, but since most people didn’t even realise that the 13th was the last show, they’ll probably just wonder to themselves what happened to that odd American series that ran on Tuesday nights for a while. Some people I know had turned off or flicked to another channel before the end of that final show, and thus missed the most cumulatively exciting final scene to be seen on our screens in years.

Now, I say that, but I must confess I never watch The West Wing, The Sopranos, Scrubs, Cold Case, Third Watch, 24 or any of the other recent US dramas. And I doubt whether I’ll watch the Quentin Tarantino-directed season finale to CSI, either. I did enjoy the first couple of seasons of Six Feet Under, and would probably continue to watch it, but it became gradually less and less compelling as it progressed — with a few notable exceptions; the episode featuring David Fisher’s carjacking and abduction being one of them, along with any scene featuring Lauren Ambrose as the quirkily beautiful redhead, Claire. The Six Feet Under scripts didn’t so much deteriorate as become scrambled and over-complicated, as though the writers were trying too hard to be weird. Not like Twin Peaks, in which the weirdness was the central character.

And this is what I think the critics of Huff have missed in their analysis of the plots and characterisation. Perhaps American audiences (most of the online critics are from the US and there’s a notable lack of good Huff fan sites) are more sophisticated. After all, they see far more drama, they see all these shows before we do, and they seem to need that formulaic style of denouement American cinema has given the world — drama that conforms to a three-act, Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey template.

But that’s not what I’m looking for in my TV viewing, my cinema, my reading or my fantasies. Story is just what happens to each of us, every day. It doesn’t question the human condition, doesn’t speak to the strangeness of existence, and so drama is the least interesting aspect of a drama. What is needed is atmosphere; I want an out-of-kilter, alienating, alienated view, because strange is what it is to be a human in this world. And a fucked-up world it is, too (channel hop to CNN and pick the first news story for proof).

So, in what way does Huff reflect my not-very-lofty requirements of drama? Somehow, it succeeds, in spite of characters interacting in an idealised Californian lifestyle few of us are ever likely to experience. But this is not an aspirational series. Few people would exchange their humdrum home life for Huff and his wife’s more glamorous one. The fantastical imaginings of Huff are less intrusive than they are in Six Feet Under, and there’s less of the supernatural (in a Twin Peaks sense) to annoy the sceptics. There is sex, drugs and almost every other kind of excess, but they are symbolic crutches, the landmarks in people’s screwed-up lives.

It seems that Russell Tupper, Huff’s lawyer, first emerged from the screenwriters’ imagination as “Russell Meeks”. Played with verve by Oliver Platt, Russell was far from meek as Huff’s best friend. Professionally brilliant and dangerous by turns, he was also socially destructive: Russell’s idea of a good time usually involved coke, booze and hookers in equal quantities by weight. Critics of Huff begged Platt to “tone down” his performance as Russell, but he was the classic larger than life oaf you both loved and hated in the same breath. Why would Platt waste his creative energy making Russell polite? He was believably unbelievable. And if I had a lawyer who was also my best friend, I’d like him to be like Russell. He’s a liability, but a fun one.

Russell struck me as the kind of guy who didn’t have to work too hard in law school but whose brilliance was gradually overshadowed by hedonism. But in real life, your socially wacky and dangerous friends remain just as unreliable and useless in a crisis. In TV show fantasy land, you know these idealised friends would be there for you when the going gets tough, and that you’d be there for them. Platt’s credits include The West Wing, for which he won the ‘Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series’ Emmy. And for me he was the true star of this show, too. He surely must have modelled the Russell character on Oscar Z. Acosta, the crazed attorney in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

Azaria as Huff is likeable enough. He’s the sort of guy you might not mind opening up to, if you were in therapy yourself. But you do wonder how his brand of psychiatry could possibly work on the unwell. He just sits there, listening to his patients, occasionally repeating something or questioning what they say. Sheesh. You might just as well have a chat with your mother or the sideboard for all the real, usable advice he gives them. And ultimately, what the whole series is about, is the absurdity of any of these characters advising anyone else on how to live their lives — most of them are seriously sick themselves.

Perhaps Huff’s committed brother Teddy is the sanest of them all. Ostensibly, Teddy and the Homeless Hungarian were the most marginalised characters. Of the two, Teddy was too unpredictable and I preferred the Hungarian — a ghostly ancestor or a pricking conscience, who appears whenever Huff is required to “do the right thing”, a gatekeeper character in the Campbell tradition. These two may have been standing on the edges of normality but, as it turned out, normality was as fragile as they were. Reality was stretched taut like a roller blind that might at any moment lose its grip and go off flapping, clattering and spinning to reveal some crazy bitch standing on the other side of the glass.

The fact that Lara Flynn-Boyle of Twin Peaks had a wacko role in Huff helps me to like it, but Lara is famously but a bony shadow of her former self. She saved her best acting for the final episode, traumatised by a rape she was not yet even able to consider to be part of her own reality. Then there was Huff’s adolescent son Byrd, with that strange, squeaky, croak of a voice, and his secret girlfriend, Gail, with her strange, squeaky, croak of a voice. They’re underage, but the most mature characters in the entire series.

My positivity towards Huff runs deeper than an affinity for certain characters, though. It was a series built on a thin premise, but it worked; the frisson between the family members, Russell’s volatile personality defects — and his even more volatile clients — and above all, like a low-volume bass drone beneath everything, the atmosphere: there’s the faint smell of rotten meat in paradise, an occasional hint of insanity in a group of people putting up a front of normal, routine, organised lives.

So Huff wasn’t about perfect characterisation. It wasn’t about brilliant storytelling. It certainly wasn’t about plots too convoluted to be second-guessed, although there were some nice twists. Huff made for excellent, gripping, addictive television, nonetheless. And I’ll go out on a limb and bet there’s been no drama quite as good as this on the small screen since This Life (the British TV series about a group of young lawyers sharing a house and starring Daniela Nardini and Jack Davenport), and North Square (the British TV series about a group of young barristers sharing a practice and starring the brilliant Phil Davies).

Not even Six Feet Under.

Clone Rangers: The Island reviewed

* * * 1/2

Despite the apparent evidence of the ubercool May-December almost-trystic Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson can't really act.

She was an inert cipher in the role of the naïve wife in A Good Woman, and in this she doesn't have to do much but run, pout and straighten her back for profile shots. But she is very pretty, with her frisky eyes, Farrah Fawcett-ish hair extensions and rubber-raft lips, and her decolletage needs no encouragement from anyone.

In fact, if they ever make a big-screen version of Aldous Huxley's dystopia Brave New World, she could be just right for the pneumatic, thwarted Lenina. Like the sterile, white-jumpsuited world of The Island, Brave New World involved another 'utopia' of cloning and perfection, though unlike here sex was encouraged (serious touching is verboten), as was soporific drug taking (here it's “Mind your sodium levels”, which would rather dull the underground party scene).

Huxley's novel was a deliberate reaction against what he saw as the Victorian nightmare of the nuclear family and, curiously enough, he wrote a final novel called, uh-huh, The Island (1962), in which he attempted to be a bit less satirical and a lot more, well, utopian in his description of what would constitute a really, really nice and good society. Dull and worthy? Let's just say that Michael Bay, the director of this very big and very noisy sci-fi epic (dialogue courtesy of the writers of Run, Dick, Run), would not have optioned it.

Ewan McGregor, in contrast to his co-star, has you totally believing that there really is a man and his clone – one the suspicious inhabitant of a seemingly perfect world with a cod-American, the other a boat designer with a light Scottish brogue. A reasonably buff McGregor even wrestles himself at one point, which might get fans of his, er, nakedly show-off art-movie The Pillow Book a bit excited. His dual role is not quite in the realm of conviction of Jeremy Irons' twins of Dead Ringers, but then Bay is no David Cronenberg. In passing, which is pretty much par for the course in this movie, Steve Buscemi is throwaway-brilliant as an unconventional plant worker who unintentionally gets Lincoln's escape juices flowing.

Those who remember the 70s TV series Logan's Run will be right at home here. “Another day in paradise,” is how one white-suited inhabitant of this world describes it. Given the preponderance of shapely women in swimsuits and lycra working hard on their abs and tans, I could see his point. But, like Logan's Run, where at 30 you're sent off to somewhere better, presumably to stop overcrowding and contravention of the Kyoto Protocol, The Island is driven – like its almost farcical product placement that seems to pass for wit in Hollywood – by more commercial motives. I don't think I'm talking out of school to reveal that this is a cloning installation, whereby bits of you are harvested as needed when your insurance policy owner – or her friendly transplant surgeon – makes the call. If you didn't pick all the major plot points up from the trailer, you simply weren't paying attention. The Island is a myth to keep the natives docile.

Need more influences? I suspect the makers have seen Minority Report and The Matrix, paying particular attention to the former's holographic analysis tools and the latter's nano-devices and motorway pile-up (or was it Mr & Mrs Smith? – no, too recent – or the marginally underrated schlockster Final Destination 2?). And maybe Coma. Or maybe I was the only one who saw that.

Anyway, Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) hasn't got the inclination or patience to stick with a cloning morality tale for long, and soon shifts into top gear for the chase when Lincoln makes his break. Into an LA in which tower-high train lines are de rigueur, but just about everything else is the same. Pity.

Fellow Brit Sean Bean is the evil doctor, Merrick, and Djimon Hounsou is the clean-up-the-mess guy who faces the inevitable crisis of conscience.

Despite plot holes the size of Arizona (that's a clue) and a pursuit that's just a bit too frenetic and vertiginous, The Island is actually a reasonable place to spend a couple of thought-free hours.

I was horrified to learn, in the course of my 'research' for this review, that a 2006 movie of Logan's Run is in the works. (The cut-off age is 21 rather than 30, it appears. Inflation has a lot to answer for.)

Competitive advantage

The smaller the pond, the more vicious the pond-life. Perhaps not for frogs and dragonflies, but certainly for food writers, poets and short-story writers. It’s hard to get published, next to impossible to make any money and your fellow writers all hate you. Who would bother?

Plenty of people. Weird but true. A publisher at one of the big multinationals once told me that in five years his firm had received 12,500 unsolicited manuscripts – 10 a day, 50 a week, 2500 a year – and had published precisely one of these. For some years now my colleague Graeme Lay and I have run short-short story (maximum 500 words) competitions looking for 100 publishable stories and usually get way more than 1000 entries. It’s Euclid’s missing axiom: more people write poetry than read it.

The rewards are derisory. Some literary magazines will accept your poem or story only if you are a subscriber. Even then you may not get paid, or at least not in cash. Maybe you’ll get a free copy of the magazine.

Most competitions charge an entry fee to cover the prize money, judge’s fees and various incidental expenses, such as paying people to read all the entries and make a selection to go to the celebrity judge ($5 per short story is standard). That’s entirely fair and proper where there isn’t a big sponsor involved. But occasionally things go wrong.

When I was convenor of the NZ Society of Authors legal/contractual advisory committee I got involved in a case where the organiser of a competition announced that there would be no first prize, just second and third, as the judge thought that none of the entries warranted first prize. If the second place-getter was better than the rest of the field, why was it not declared first place-getter? What happened to the missing prize money? I never found out, though I did get a lot of abuse from the organiser for having the temerity to enquire.

So it can be a snake pit. But New Zealand competitions are run fairly and any that aren’t are the result of incompetence rather than dishonesty. Not so overseas. Who knows what happens in Milan or Novosibirsk, but in the US it appears that at least one poetry competition has been decided not only on the basis of who you know, which is traditional, but on who you sleep with.

Foetry describes a system riddled with fraud and sycophancy in which anonymous judges award prizes to their students, friends and lovers. In one contest in 1999 sponsored by the University of Georgia Press, the prize went to a poet who was in a relationship with one of the judges; the couple married a few months later.

That would never happen in our pond.

Thar she blows!

We take you now to a brainstorming meeting at one of New Zealand’s top advertising agencies, where the Creative Director believes there’s no such thing as a bad idea. He’s almost right — after all, “good” isn’t in his vocabulary.

“OK, people. We need to attract the difficult, teenage consumer demographic. How do we get inside their minds? What makes ’em tick? What are teenagers doing today? You shout ’em out and I’ll whiteboard ’em.”

“Wanking…?”

"It’s been done. Haven’t you seen the one where the kid buys a milkshake at a dairy and then thinks everyone’s gesturing that he’s a wanker when in fact they’re just telling him to shake?! Hil-ar-i-ous. That’s a multi-million-dollar wrist-action, right there, folks. Priceless.”

“How about Snowboarding?”

“Farting.”

“Animals?”

“Eh? You mean, like, bestiality…?”

“No, teenagers like animals — in cartoons, like, Itchy and Scratchy, Ren and Stimpy… ‘n’ stuff…”

"Kids, kids, they’ve all been done — the Paddle Pops snowboarding ads, with Happy the farting hyena on ice? That’s some avalanche — man, I just wish that’d been on our books. Anyway, what are you people watching, the frigging John Campbell show?! The Hitler Channel? You’re supposed to be media-savvy. Animation is so old-economy.”

“Well, what about those pornographic Grand Theft Auto downloads?”

[Tumbleweed traverses the boardroom on a howling desert wind.]

“Farting…”

“We’ve already got farting! Jesus, the client’s a fast-food company.”

“Yes, but my idea’s different — this is, like, a teenage girl… farting.”

“Wait! Yes… think it through…! You could be onto something, kid. How about, the girl complains about her boyfriend being a noisy eater, but he blames his crunchy chicken burger… Then, the girl… she’s a pretty teenager… here it comes, the girl farts, but it turns out to be a double-whammy…”

“A double-Whopper.”

“Button it, Jerrod. I’m still thinking… the girl farts… but she says, ‘It wasn’t me, it was the burger’! It was the chicken burger!”

[Meaningful glances over the lattes, muffins and frapuccinos.]

“Maybe she, like, listens to the chicken burger before she farts… but we can work out the exact storyboard details later. Anyhow, she definitely lets rip.”

“Brilliant! Fucking brilliant. We are so going to win an EFFIE award!”

“The Burger King people are gonna cream themselves… Now, Britney! Bring me those fart tapes from the audio library — we may need to hire a consultant. Choosing the right kind of fart for the girl is going to be crucial… Who are we using as our fart Tsar this quarter…?”

[Fade sound and vision.]

The rest is televisual history.