The Vote: Hypertastic infotainment

TV3 is alternating shows on their 8:30pm Wednesday current affairs slot. Once a month the ‘3rd Degree’ bromide bromance of the cherubic sledgehammer Duncan Garner and the wiry, waspish Guyon Espiner will
be replaced by a studio audience debate format with Linda Clark as the duo’s chaperone. Their first ‘national debate programme’ was a raucus affair – more like a choreographed scrap gone off the rails
than an on track cerebral discussion – and what it lacked in facts was more than made up for with hyperbole and volume.

Linda Clark, as moderator, was reduced to simply reading out the voting methods to viewers for the most part. Seeing as ‘The Vote’ is premised on viewers voting it is a necessary evil to keep distracting
the viewers trying to follow the debate with the instructions to participate, but what an annoyance. When Clark did start to enter the frame after the half-way point she was excellent. She let a lot slide in the first half, but made a valliant effort in the second. The super-sensitive nonsense that the NZ Herald’s media columnist, John Drinnan, had been putting about prior to the show regarding Clark’s supposed conflict of interest in being a lawyer in a firm contracted to state entities was weak then and after her performance such objection has surely evaporated. She is a professional and should be trusted as such given her record in the same way anyone else would be.

One of the features of this innovative format is that Garnspiner are allocated the for or against team on a coin toss prior. I missed this bit, as it was at the very start, so I was impressed with how the two
both handled the moot. They were spirited – giddy to the point of intoxication. These were men who have devised a stage upon which they can clash as stags, and they swaggered around and jabbed accusatory fingers and talked over each other to their heart’s delight. But what was the result of presenting a debate in this hyperactive environment and what where they trying to achieve?

Crucially they have created excitement and drama (out of the reasonably dull: taxing unhealthy food, in this first episode). This is a precondition for popularity which they need to carry off what they hype as a show that will lead to a change of public policy.

Garner says: ”Make sure you vote, it’s really important, you may change the government’s hands-off policy”. Or not. He’s the political editor so he knows that’s eleven tenths of bullshit. The Nats are as
likely to tax unhealthy food as Oscar Pistorius is to be asked to give the Gun Safety address to the Royal Society for Not Shooting Your Girlfriend Dead. But as with the tawdry victim-porn in the first dicey outing of Garnspiner’s 3rd Degree, and judging by their critical banter about their own pieces, they are firmly in the post-modern era where there is no shame in gimmicky infotainment and no qualms in serving the demands of the corporation’s marketing division. Due to the acute ratings-driven competition Garnspiner could possibly say anything about the show – no matter how overcooked – as long as it was
remotely plausible. For example, after the show they were saying ‘NZ votes for new tax’! This is similar to the way US network shows speak of and talk to ‘America’. Yuck. Yuck accompanied with the same sort of
tittering you could hear on occasion from the studio audience at random. Tittering because something absurd is happening.

The hype seems to have worked for them. They created enough self-fulfilling momentum to dominate the twittersphere during airtime and onwards. The leveraging by Garner on his Radio Live show and the backing from mediaworks to proliferate their own news story is a cynical feat well executed. More so given the NZ On Air funding that has had the bitchy TVNZ stormtroopers in hissy fits at the Hobson Street Death Star.

The confrontational style of Garnspiner suits the traditional debate: it forced answers and was a useful method of highlighting the differences, but they did have trouble getting the pitch right when they ploughed in at warp factor 10. And at that speed Scotty says: “we’re coming in too fast, we’ll tear apart! We’ll ne’er make it cap’n”. That all went down before the first ad break. At that early phase a ranting and overwhelmed Espiner began an antagonistic haranguing of his own team. Hurtling out of control towards a nebula while Clark in the captain’s chair is trying to open a bag of chips or whatever she was doing during the first half. They had fallen into the bad cop/worse cop routine as Garner kicked in, but it was a lapse that wasn’t to recur. Not that it is easy to discern through all the shouty bits. Which was the majority of the exercise (some might say, indeed, the point of the exercise).

For an hour show this had more pace than Lyall Creek. That is to say, for the non-punter, it was extremely quick. Fast-paced is an understatement. There are consquences with going like the clappers. Clark’s opening piece on the issue was only about 90 secs. Celebrity and audience spots were brief and not conducive to dialogue with them being on the floor. Linda Clark reading out facebook comments in that last bit was like Einstein reading out a comic strip for his Nobel lecture. Her incisive summation made up for it.

I got the impression a lot was being lost while a lot was just being repeated – repeated in ever more hysterical degrees by the combatants. Garnspiner egged them on, at one point encouraging the young Gareth
Morgan fanatic to thump the desk. It crossed into such moments of pantomime too often. Even those without a full spectrum of upper middle class pretensions may have thought it more a game show than a
state-funded current affairs flagship production. It was one step closer to a full-blown Howard Beal Show (from the apocalyptic movie ‘Network’), than it was a step closer to resolving policy.

As for the moot point ‘Is it time to tax unhealthy food?’, it must be first stated that it IS NOT the usual issue in this field, which is GST off fresh fruit and vegetables – Labour’s unconvincing half-hearted bone to the left at the 2011 general election that they are busy renegging on. In other words a discount on healthy food was not on the table. So the argument revolves around US and European
experience of application of their sin taxes and theories of what may happen here. As soon as the sugarless puritans pegged a minimum tax of 20% on deemed unhealthy food the rate itself then became the issue which was not helpful. On the other side the Mayor of Porirua was out of his depth, capable of only a one-dimensional, libertarian view. It unnecessarily weakened that team. Let’s hope they don’t make that
mistake again.

The second thing about the question is the division of opinion. My hunch is that they chose a question for the first episode where they had near level support for and against with a decent enough don’t knows to make it a debate that could go either way. I expect issues later on to be more lopsided.

One question I’m still fuzzy on is was it actually live? I guess it was presented as live, but recorded on the day with Garnspiner’s summary of the vote tallies from the various media (#thevotenz on Twitter, Facebook, audience and texting) done as live. Another little cheat, but this is post-modern, post-ethical, post-critical television and in these conditions it will be judged a success or failure on its share of the 18-39s.

Sadly it managed to lose 42% of the audience of 3rd Degree the week previous. Ouch.

Personally though, I liked it, I enjoyed it and I look forward to the next one. I think they took a risk with this, not with the technology or social media, but with the performers, as it all depends so much on personalities. It has delivered two sorts of audience together to witness and join in the fracas they have
generated – that is an achievement.