Television

Or tellie as the Kiwis call it. While I’m on the subject, let me just rant a moment about the “ie” phenomenon. I think both the Kiwis and the Aussies do it. But EVERYTHING has a nickname—or the actual name—that ends in “ie:” nappies are diapers, there’s the tellie that I just mentioned, and the brellie is short for umbrella. Throaties are a brand of throat lozenges. Teddies are gummi bears. There are Oreo Cookies called Wheelies. I could go on, and I might just do that later!

Now to the tellie.

New Zealand uses SKY TV, owned by Rupert Murdoch—by itself obnoxious of course as he’s a right-wing zillionaire asshole trying to take over the US media and the world. You also know him as the bucks behind FOX. So, as much as I’d like to NOT choose SKY, it’s all we have here.

The major SKY tellie package has like 30 channels, where at home you’d get tons more. You can add on SKY SPORT and get three additional 24-hour sports channels. Of course you’d get rugby and cricket and some crazy bowling on a lawn sport with oval-shaped balls that looks kinda like a form of curling, only weirder, if possible. And you’d get NZ basketball—the NBL is the league in this country and basically they are city teams playing each other. NOT exciting. There’s net ball and hockey, which is really field hockey and a women’s team that uses really oddly-short sticks so they look hunched over all the time . . . well Don’s already mentioned the issues we have with the sports. Okay, enough, SKY SPORT is hardly worth the money. Movie channels? Not sure what movies we’d see, some of the “premiere” movies we’ve seen advertised are Men In Black, 50 First Dates, etc. Not really premieres as they are majorly old.

So, now that we have SKY to “choose” from, what’s actually on TV? Well to start, lots of news. Like for hours all day and early evening. I guess in thinking about it, that’s not so different than the US, but the cool part about it is they report on the entire country and you get to hear what happens everywhere, not just in Denver or the Front Range. Denver TV stations rarely even report on Grand Junction stories, so it’s really a neat way to learn more about the country by watching the news. Again, that being said, the news stories are pretty funny and often sensationalized. We are now going through the “Handless Corpse” case which is a murder in Wellington. Then there’s the Twins Murder and the Brutal School Teacher Slaying, and I could go on. Obviously they are not funny stories, but they reported on in a different way than at home that makes them seem really close.

Political reporting is even more different because the reporters are extremely blunt, ask to-the-point questions—and get answers--and really put people under pressure. Just as in the UK where you’ve seen Parliament members go at each other more than they do in the US, here is the same with Parliamentary debates, they actually DEBATE!! They speak to each other, raise voices, make points, have arguments. They do showboat and they’ve learned a lot about US political tactics of late, you can see that too. But it’s definitely more real. Today was really interesting as the national media (I want to keep saying local media, but it is truly all national, as I was saying earlier) was covering some protesters in Wellington (capital of country) who were against a proposed bill put up by an elected politician. These protesters were very vocal and the politician had been scheduled to speak to the group, but felt intimidated because they were so loud and wouldn’t let him speak. So he stood to the side, and a reporter from one of the news broadcasts interviewed him and asked him why he backed down, why wouldn’t he speak, and pumped him up to go up to the microphone to address the crowd. The politician actually felt the intimidation and went up there! Remarkable, really! The crowd was loud and ultimately wouldn’t let him speak very long, but jeesh you’d never see that in the US.

TV shows: well, what to say other than they import a lot from the US. They have curbed importing UK shows recently because they don’t seem to draw enough of an audience, especially the 18-35 year olds. (Really, that is odd??! But they are so funny J ) So the evenings are loaded with shows like Rock Star Supernova, Project Runway that appears in the US on Bravo, Survivor of course, CSI regular and New York, but curiously no Miami. There’s Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy on Mondays, 24 on Fridays and Scrubs and Will and Grace are on too. Before these shows come on in the 8pm or 9pm slots, we have your basic Euro-type soap opera shows, with the daddy of them all in NZ being Shortland Street, a hospital-based “drama” that is a 30-minute, 5-day/week show watched by most Kiwis. There’s Home and Away, some simple pop-ish show with really beautiful people on it living in Summer Bay (fictional town) and falling in love with other beautiful people. The neat thing is that you can see the difference in the camera shooting technique: no soft lighting and air-brushing camera lenses, you see people way more clearly and last night I actually saw acne scars on a pretty woman that normally would have been lens-ed off in the States. Yes, actual acne.

I’m sure we’ll write more on the tellie in the future as we have it on a LOT. You know us, we are tellie folk.