TV Review: Bits not sharp

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greg_boyed__alison_mau__jesse_mulligan_N2Give it time, they said – and I said. Time for the hosts to find their schtick and the producers to find its purpose and audience. Because it wasn’t apparent when it started that it had either any compelling reason to exist or anyone on camera who could articulate whatever it was supposed to be about. We’d have to wait. Would the awkward trio of hosts overcome their initial insynchronisity and gel?

After twenty weeks or so it’s quite long enough to proclaim Seven Sharp to be every bit as shithouse as I said it was originally. If anything the hosts have become worse in each other’s company. Congealed perhaps, not gelled. It’s so bad they seem to have been separated now and normally someone is absent from the desk. All the atmosphere and intimacy of a working relationship via Skype. Like being at a meeting with disinterested and quibbling rivals and one of them isn’t even physically in the damn room. It’s not working out. I guess that’s why the desk sometimes has half a dozen or more people on for ballast. And still so shallow.

They are better by themselves attempting to communicate than collectively – arguing across each other as they do and invariably on some point of triviality. With idiotic, idiosynchratic tangents from Boyed as he does, like a puppy learning new tricks, and with untimely, idiotic interjections from Mau as she does, clunking her way into the dialogue like a drunken ox through a fence, it quickly degenerates from a conversation into a battle of wits where both parties are unarmed.

And just as well the other one, Mulligan – the comedian – knows enough about timing and when someone is talking shit to shut up when the brain farts from the other two start smelling. An all too common interlude in the unscripted moments of banter upon which the show uncomfortably hangs. Or Mulligan’s relaxed, detached reticence in a lower gear could perhaps less generously be ascribed to a Prozac over-prescription. Either way on Planet Jessie it’s all cool, but captain and Ms Buzzkill are really starting to harsh the mellow.

It has barely lived up to the low expectations of the critics. Since the content was long written off as the bastard child product of the harder-edged Holmes and Close Up legacy that hooked up with the lighter, chatty banality of breakfast TV (and probably conceived at the TVNZ Marketing Department’s Christmas party with the help of a few wines and a bit of P). So the question of quality in current affairs was never seriously an issue. It wasn’t designed to be a serious prospect. So the measure of success I posed 20 or so weeks ago was nothing more than the three of them getting along together. That was too much to have asked.

They still fail the basics. They don’t know how to introduce themselves, nor have they worked out a farewell. The bit in between being such crap you think they would have taken the easy points on offer. Alas, like a bunch of kids looking clueless in an adult situation they appear dumbfounded and amateur. All the great shows have signature welcome and farewells, intro and outro, and the fact they have opted for not even having one at all says a lot about the committee that decided to have a trio in charge. There is no leadership and there is not enough room in the TVNZ corporate playbook for personalities (and the salaries and terms they demand).

All the most annoying aspects are still prominent. The exhortions to use the internet are particularly irksome. But when we look for network siblings to compete with TV3’s more organic and multi-cultural shows we find the TVNZ treatment and the bruising from their heavy hands evident.

Best Bits!, a half-pie comedy TV clips show sort of half pie competes with 7 Days on Fridays. Te Radar sort of half-pie hosts it and some others sort of half-pie participate and the audience half-pie sort of applauds every so often. But not often enough. So they’ve run a hideously obvious canned laughter track all over it. Ghastly. They weren’t laughing on account of it not being humourous, but one wave of the TVNZ magic shitstick has sorted that out.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

Radar, the loveable hairy, hippy, I can live with, he can’t help being him. But Rose is a ranting vacuum, the sound of a thousand bubble gum bubbles popping, and Matt was swivelling his head and looking all over the place like he was Stevie Wonder. Who the fuck are these people?

Not the best.

1 COMMENT

  1. Perhaps the problem with Seven Sharp in particular, is that they have created a show around demographics. Seven Days can be very funny at times while Best Bits seems to be a not so funny clone of Seven Days. I, for one, am so over references to L&P, Whittakers Chocolate and other kiwiana beloved of the 40 to 60 age group (which was long ago hijacked by baby boomer advertising and PR companies). On Seven Days a couple of weeks ago Maurice Williamson confused rudeness with humour, and the Top Twins last week actually weren’t much better. At least Maurice outed the voice of the Pak n Save stick man adverts.

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